Translating information-dense English texts into German and Swedish

What is it about?

This paper reports on a corpus-based contrastive project exploring the structural preferences within noun phrases in English, German and Swedish. More specifically, it targets English hyphenated premodifiers (science-based targets; anti-inflammatory effect) contrasted with their German and Swedish translations. Comparisons between non-fiction and fiction suggest that information density and terminological precision are more important factors in the non-fiction genre than in fiction.

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Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Hyphenated premodifiers are typical examples of highly condensed structures representing particular challenges for translators from English as they – at least partly – have to “unpack” these into lengthier, more elaborate expressions. In our study, the German and English translators resort to postmodifiers in the form of, for example, relative clauses, leading to a higher degree of explicitness than the original English structure. Overall, the results are relevant to linguists working contrastively on grammatical structures, and to active and trainee translators, presenting them with the most frequent translation solutions for each language pair.