<p>This essay deals with translation issues arising when translating a German source text – situated within the field of media communication and political science – into Swedish. More specifically, it focuses on translation problems and solutions in regard to extended participial modifiers and metaphorical expressions.From a translation perspective, complex German pre-nominal participial modifiers are known to pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This depends on language-specific restrictions within the nominal domain. In linguistic translation literature, it is commonly held, that complex pre-nominal participial modifiers cause – in Vinay & Darbelnet’s (1977) terminology – 'transpositions', yielding a Swedish relative clause. This widely held assumption again proved to be right. In some cases, however, other structural options were made use of such as abbreviated (participial) clauses. Also, depending on the complexity of the modifier, transpositions were involved which crossed one or more sentence boundaries. In contrast to complex nominal phrases with pre-nominal participial modifiers, metaphors are usually considered to be stylistically inappropriate in academic discourse. However, a closer examination of the metaphorical expressions appearing in the source text showed that they are almost without exception lexicalized or conventionalized and, therefore, not particularly artistic or daring. The analysis of the translation procedures involved when translating metaphorical expressions was limited to metaphors linked to the area of politics and career, mainly stemming from the conceptual domains: POLITICS IS WAR/A GAME and CAREER IS A JOURNEY. The analysis shows that German and Swedish have similar metaphors, building on those exact concepts. Still, literal translation was not applied in each and every case. In some cases, a neutral periphrasis or a formal equivalent was employed which resulted in a loss or change of some of the semantic aspects inherent to the original metaphor.</p><p>Keywords: <em>translation, nominal phrases, extended modifiers, metaphors</em></p>

<p>Medical information must be available for all people in the world. Therefore it is important to translate medical research articles into foreign languages. The aim of this essay was to translate a German medical research article called “Troponinerhöhung und EKG-Veränderungen bei Schlaganfall und Subarachnoidalblutung” into Swedish and to analyse how problems that appeared during the translation process could be solved. The analysis was based on Vinay and Darbelnets, Kollers and Ingos translation theories and dealt with the question how to translate German noun phrases into Swedish. Special attention was paid to noun phrases consisting of medical terms and noun phrases containing extended modifiers.</p><p>The medical terms in the source text were divided into three categories depending on their origin, Greek and Latin terms, German terms and English terms. The translation of a large number of Greek and Latin terms was based on the translation procedure called borrowing. Calque was represented especially in the translation of terms of German origin, whereas borrowing or paraphrasing was preferred when translating English terms.</p><p>There were 63 noun phrases with extended modifiers in the source text. Two fifths of these corresponded to Swedish noun phrases with extended modifiers, whereas the rest must be translated into Swedish noun phrases with adjective premodifiers or relative clauses or into verbal expressions.</p>

Medical information must be available for all people in the world. Therefore it is important to translate medical research articles into foreign languages. The aim of this essay was to translate a German medical research article called “Troponinerhöhung und EKG-Veränderungen bei Schlaganfall und Subarachnoidalblutung” into Swedish and to analyse how problems that appeared during the translation process could be solved. The analysis was based on Vinay and Darbelnets, Kollers and Ingos translation theories and dealt with the question how to translate German noun phrases into Swedish. Special attention was paid to noun phrases consisting of medical terms and noun phrases containing extended modifiers. The medical terms in the source text were divided into three categories depending on their origin, Greek and Latin terms, German terms and English terms. The translation of a large number of Greek and Latin terms was based on the translation procedure called borrowing. Calque was represented especially in the translation of terms of German origin, whereas borrowing or paraphrasing was preferred when translating English terms. There were 63 noun phrases with extended modifiers in the source text. Two fifths of these corresponded to Swedish noun phrases with extended modifiers, whereas the rest must be translated into Swedish noun phrases with adjective premodifiers or relative clauses or into verbal expressions.

This essay deals with translation issues arising when translating a German source text – situated within the field of media communication and political science – into Swedish. More specifically, it focuses on translation problems and solutions in regard to extended participial modifiers and metaphorical expressions.From a translation perspective, complex German pre-nominal participial modifiers are known to pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This depends on language-specific restrictions within the nominal domain. In linguistic translation literature, it is commonly held, that complex pre-nominal participial modifiers cause – in Vinay &amp; Darbelnet’s (1977) terminology – 'transpositions', yielding a Swedish relative clause. This widely held assumption again proved to be right. In some cases, however, other structural options were made use of such as abbreviated (participial) clauses. Also, depending on the complexity of the modifier, transpositions were involved which crossed one or more sentence boundaries. In contrast to complex nominal phrases with pre-nominal participial modifiers, metaphors are usually considered to be stylistically inappropriate in academic discourse. However, a closer examination of the metaphorical expressions appearing in the source text showed that they are almost without exception lexicalized or conventionalized and, therefore, not particularly artistic or daring. The analysis of the translation procedures involved when translating metaphorical expressions was limited to metaphors linked to the area of politics and career, mainly stemming from the conceptual domains: POLITICS IS WAR/A GAME and CAREER IS A JOURNEY. The analysis shows that German and Swedish have similar metaphors, building on those exact concepts. Still, literal translation was not applied in each and every case. In some cases, a neutral periphrasis or a formal equivalent was employed which resulted in a loss or change of some of the semantic aspects inherent to the original metaphor. Keywords: translation, nominal phrases, extended modifiers, metaphors

One of the main characteristics of German technical language is the nominal style, which includes complex pre-nominal and post-nominal extended modifiers. A commonly held view is that these are less common in Swedish due to language-specific restrictions and preferences. As such, they may pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This essay examines this particular problem and focuses on the translation of four different complex extended modifiers: adjectival, participial, genitival and prepositional.The aim of this study was to determine which syntactic structures are used when these modifiers are translated into Swedish and to identify shifts using the concept “grammatical metaphor”, thereby focusing on the degree of grammatical metaphoricity. For the purposes of this study, a chapter of the technical book Neues Bauen mit Stroh in Europa by Gruber, Gruber and Sentler was translated into Swedish and then analysed with the above-mentioned aims in mind.The study showed that out of the 117 noun phrases with extended complex modifiers in the source text 21 were transposed into a less explicit, direct structure and more metaphorical language. The metaphorization was in some cases a result of simplification/omission of less dense semantic material and/or the translation into compounds. In 46 cases, the extended modifiers showed the same degree of grammatical metaphoricity as the source language expression and thus were re-metaphorized. In the remaining cases, a verbal or more explicit structure was chosen in the translation. This especially proved to be the case with pre-nominal extended adjectival and participial modifiers.