The purpose of this essay is to analyze the translation of the specific technical language of railway transport from Swedish into German. The analysis is based on a self-conducted translation of selected passages of rules and regulations issued by the Swedish government agency Trafikverket (The Swedish Transport Administration). The following questions serve as a starting point: Which factors influence the final choice of a translation equivalent when several options are available? Which translation strategies can be used to close a lexical gap in the target language? And, furthermore, how can ”false friends” be identified so that terminological errors can be avoided in the target text? The essay is divided into two parts. The first part introduces major concepts such as equivalence, denotative equivalence and false friends. The second part consists of an analysis which discusses a selection of representative examples from the translation. The first part of the analysis focuses on cases where the target language provides several translation equivalents. By analyzing the semantics and comparing the related meanings of these equivalents, it was possible to pin down the most suitable term in the target language. In most cases the final term choice was confirmed by parallel texts. The second part discusses cases where the target language lacks an equivalent technical term. In most cases the lexical gaps could be closed by loaning the source-language term and adding a short explanation in the target text. The final section is devoted to false friends. By consulting parallel texts, several false friends in the target language were identified and also removed from an earlier version of the target text.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-46526 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Dreger Eriksson, Kerstin |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | German |
| 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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