This study examined the translation of adjectival pre-modifiers (i.e. pre-modifying adjectives and pre-modifying participles) from English into Swedish. The selection of this topic and material was inspired by previous research on the increasing frequency of noun phrase pre-modification in English, contrasted with notions of Swedish-specific preferences for translating English pre-modifiers into different structures found in previous research and literature. Swedish tendencies included rendering English pre-modifiers as post-modification and the compounding of pre-modifying adjectives or participles with noun phrase heads to form Swedish compound nouns. The concept of translation shifts as labels for translation methods was used to classify translations of adjectival pre-modifiers, in addition to categorising the translation choices based on word class, rank and position. The study concluded that English adjectival pre-modifiers were overwhelmingly translated with formal correspondence (86%), i.e. as adjectival pre-modifiers. The other translation methods that were applied were used considerably less extensively; unit shifts and class shifts constituted 9% and 4% of all translation choices, respectively; omissions of the sense and meaning of the adjectival pre-modifier were found as the translation method for 1% of English adjectival pre-modifiers. Unit shifts were found to result in a total of 8 different types of structural equivalents to adjectival pre-modifiers. In order of frequency, these were: prepositional phrase, first element of compound noun, extended attribute, pre-modifying prepositional phrase, verb phrase, first element of compound adverb, last element of compound participle and relative clause. Class shifts resulted in 3 categories of formally non-correspondent structures, namely adverb, noun and genitival attribute. The conclusions that could be drawn from the results were that the tendency for the Swedish translation of adjectival pre-modifiers to result in post-modification and compound nouns was small. A qualitative analysis showed that select examples of translations to formally correspondent equivalents were commonly motivated by considerations of readability to reduce sentence length and complexity. Examples of various category shifts were for the most part found to have been caused by the questionable idiomaticity of formally correspondent translation options.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-77342 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Draganic, Roberto |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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