This study examines German noun compounds and their translations into Swedish. The aim of the study is to investigate to what extent the nominal compounds of the source text are translated with the same structure in the target text, and what consequences possible paraphrases could have for the target text. The first part of the analysis focuses on how the first constituent of the nominal compound and the complexity of the nominal compound affect the translation strategies. The second part examines ad-hoc compounds and how they are translated from German into Swedish. The material for the study comes from the article “Gesichter der Großstadt“ that appeared in the history magazine Geo Epoche 2021. The analysis was carried out on both a quantitative and a qualitative level.           The quantitative result shows that about 62 % of the source text noun compounds were translated with the same structure in the target language. However, in over a third of the cases, the noun compounds were translated with other structures. The translation strategy “nominal phrase with different attributes” was the second most used translation strategy with about 17 %, and the translation strategy “reduction” was the third most used strategy with about 15 %. However, these strategies were used much more frequently in the translation of complex nominal compounds and ad hoc compounds. This suggests that factors such as complexity and occurrence of a nominal compound affect the translation strategy.

This study investigates strategies used when translating compound nouns from German to Swedish. The source text translated and used for the analysis stems from the travel book Couchsurfing im Iran. Meine Reise hinter verschlossene Türen by Stephan Orth (2015). The focus of the study is twofold: 1) examining established compounds and 2) ad hoc compounds. The quantitative part of the analysis is based on Fleischer/Barz’ (2007) morphological classification of compound nouns and Vinay/Darbelnet’s (1995/2004) translation procedures, and also forms the basis for the qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis shows that while nearly 60% of the established compound nouns were translated literally, quite a large number were rendered using other strategies, mainly paraphrases with nominal phrases. The translations of the ad hoc compounds showed the reverse pattern: only 36% were translated literally, while nearly 60% were translated with nominal phrases. The qualitative analysis suggests four major explanations for these shifts. The first is morphological limitation, where the Swedish language in some instances does not allow a certain word to be used as a compound modifier. The second is language preference, where a tendency towards a more verbal paraphrase in Swedish was noticed. The third is based on Toury’s law of growing standardization, which states that translations tend to be more explicit, in this case preferring longer and more transparent paraphrases to denser compounds. The fourth explanation is the lexical gap where ad hoc compounds proved to be particularly difficult to translate when one of their units did not have a direct counterpart in Swedish.