Premodification in translation

Abstract

The present study concerns English hyphenated premodifiers translated into German and Swedish. The material was collected from the fiction part of the English–Swedish Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, and includes almost 700 instances of translations into both German and Swedish, as well as 500 instances each of translations from German and Swedish into English. In the material, hyphenated premodifiers come in many different forms. However, they are mostly short, often containing nominal heads (head-office (man)), ed-participles (water-filled (ditches)) or adjectives (gray-green (tweed)), and only a few are longer, creative hapaxes ((her) “take-me-seriously-or-I’ll-sue-you” (demeanor)). The translations into English contain less variation than English originals, as predicted by translation theory. When the premodifiers are translated into German and Swedish they are often restructured, and only half are translated into German and Swedish premodifiers. German and Swedish premodifying compound adjectives/participles are the most frequent equivalents of English hyphenated premodifiers. More complex English premodifiers are often rendered as postmodifiers in German and Swedish. As could be expected from the preferred noun-phrase structures in German and Swedish, German translations have a (slightly) stronger preference for premodification (e.g., the all-embracing unit → die alles umschließende Einheit), while Swedish (slightly) more often uses postmodifying clauses and prepositional phrases (fifteen-year-old schoolgirls → skolflickor i femtonårsåldern). German and Swedish postmodifiers are very rarely translated into English hyphenated premodifiers.

English complex premodifiers and their German and Swedish correspondences

“…Thus, it seems likely that the correspondences used for non-fiction structures would be of a slightly different nature than those used for the more creative fiction instances, where focus is more on stylistic considerations than on semantic equivalence and condensation. The present paper therefore explores hyphenated pre-modifiers in English original and translated non-fiction, and their German and Swedish correspondences, contrasting the findings throughout with Levin and Ström Herold's (2017) fiction data from ESPC. The following research questions will be addressed:…”

“…Hyphenated premodifiers (Levin and Ström Herold, 2017) have been discussed under a number of headings, such as 'premodifying compounds' (Quirk et al, 1985(Quirk et al, : 1569, 'compound premodifiers' (Rush, 1998), 'compound adjectival premodifiers' (Ljung, 2000), 'phrasal compounds' (Meibauer, 2007;Trips, 2012;Bauer et al, 2013) and '(adjectival) hyphenated phrasal expressions' (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2020). As already indicated in Section 1, these premodifiers range from shorter two-part premodifiers, both conventionalized, (3) and ( 4), and more creative instances (1), to longer multi-word occurrences, as in (2), that appear to be produced on the fly -or, in the words of Bauer and Renouf (2001: 108) -where "a piece of syntax […] has been captured to be a premodifier".…”

“…In Levin and Ström Herold (2017), we investigated a phenomenon that is increasingly used in English -complex premodifiers where the individual items are linked by hyphens, reflecting the overall increase of premodification in English (Biber et al, 2009). We labelled these structures 'hyphenated premodifiers' , a term which will also be used in the present study, and compared these with their German and Swedish correspondences in both originals and translations.…”

“…We labelled these structures 'hyphenated premodifiers' , a term which will also be used in the present study, and compared these with their German and Swedish correspondences in both originals and translations. These English premodifiers vary in complexity, i.e., length: sometimes only two items are conjoined, as in (1), but there are also multi-item instances, as in (2) (both examples from ESPC in Levin and Ström Herold, 2017):…”

“…Section 4 first focuses on the findings in the English texts, both original and translated English, and then moves on to the comparisons with the German and Swedish correspondences. Where relevant, comparisons will be made with the ESPC fiction data used in Levin and Ström Herold (2017).…”