Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T01:07:32.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Obama presidency, the Macintosh keyboard and the Norway fiasco: English proper noun modifiers and their German and Swedish correspondences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2019

JENNY STRÖM HEROLD  and
MAGNUS LEVIN
JENNY STRÖM HEROLD
Affiliation:
Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, Universitetsplatsen 1, 351 95 Växjö, Swedenjenny.strom.herold@lnu.se, magnus.levin@lnu.se
MAGNUS LEVIN
Affiliation:
Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, Universitetsplatsen 1, 351 95 Växjö, Swedenjenny.strom.herold@lnu.se, magnus.levin@lnu.se
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article concerns English proper noun modifiers denoting organizations, people and places and their German and Swedish correspondences. It supplements previous studies touching upon contrastive comparisons by providing large-scale systematic findings on the translation correspondences of the three aforementioned semantic types. The data are drawn from the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS), which contains popular non-fiction, a genre previously not studied in connection with proper noun modifiers. The results show that organization-based modifiers are the most common and person-based ones the rarest in English originals. Compounds are the most frequent correspondences in German and Swedish translations and originals with genitives and prepositional phrases as other common options. The preference for compounds is stronger in German, while it is stronger for prepositional phrases in Swedish translations, reflecting earlier findings on language-specific tendencies. Organization-based modifiers tend to be translated into compounds, and place-based modifiers into prepositional phrases. German and Swedish translators relatively often opt for similar target-language structures. Two important target-language differences emerge: (i) compounds with complex heads are dispreferred in Swedish (US news show > *USA-nyhetsprogram) but unproblematic in German (US-Nachrichtensendung), and (ii) compounds with acronyms (WTO ruling > WTO-Entscheidung) are more frequent in German.

Keywords

proper noun modifierscompoundsacronymstranslationthe Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Special Issue 4: Different perspectives on proper noun modifiers , December 2019 , pp. 827 - 854
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baker, Mona. 1993. Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In Baker, Mona, Francis, Gill & Tognini-Bonelli, Elena (eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair, 233–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Grieve, Jack & Iberri-Shea, Gina. 2009. Noun phrase modification. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia (eds.), One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English, 182–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 2004 [1986]. Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation. In House, Juliane & Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (eds.), Interlingual and intercultural communication: Discourse and cognition in translation and second language acquisition, 17–35. Tübingen: Narr. Reprinted in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The translation studies reader, 2nd edn, 290–305. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Breban, Tine. 2018. Proper names used as modifiers: A comprehensive functional analysis. English Language and Linguistics 22(3), 381–401.Google Scholar
Campe, Petra. 2010. Syntactic variation in German adnominal constructions: An application to the alternatives ‘genitive’, ‘apposition’ and ‘compound’. In Lenz, Alexandra N. & Plewnia, Albrecht (eds.), Grammar between norm and variation, 193–218. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Carlsson, Maria. 2004. Deutsch und Schwedisch im Kontrast: Zur Distribution nominaler und verbaler Ausdrucksweise in Zeitungstexten. PhD dissertation, Gothenburg University.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jacob. 1960. A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20, 37–46.Google Scholar
Fagan, Sarah M. B. 2009. German: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fleischer, Wolfgang. 1997. Phraseologie der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Fleischer, Wolfgang & Barz, Irmhild. 2012. Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Gellerstam, Martin. 1986. Translationese in Swedish novels translated from English. In Wollin, Lars & Lindquist, Hans (eds.), Translation studies in Scandinavia, 88–95. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.Google Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz J. 2004. Compound or phrase? English noun-plus-noun constructions and the stress criterion. English Language and Linguistics 8(1), 1–24.Google Scholar
Ingo, Rune. 2007. Konsten att översätta: Översättandets praktik och didaktik. Lund: Studentlitteratur.Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2013. A Mozart sonata and the Palme murder: The structure and uses of proper-name compounds in Swedish. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 253–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in contemporary English: A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
LEGS: Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus. https://lnu.se/en/research/searchresearch/the-linnaeus-university-english-german-swedish-corpus-legs/ (accessed 1 July 2017).Google Scholar
Levin, Magnus & Ström Herold, Jenny. 2017. Premodification in translation: English hyphenated premodifiers in fiction and their translations into German and Swedish. In Egan, Thomas & Dirdal, Hildegunn (eds.), Cross-linguistic correspondences: From lexis to genre, 149–75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Levin, Magnus, Herold, Jenny Ström & Tyrkkö, Jukka. In preparation. From the BBC to the PFC and CAPTCHA: Acronym typology from a cross-linguistic perspective. Paper presented at ICAME 39 in Tampere, 30 May – 3 June 2018.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2007. Emerging variation: Determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English. English Language and Linguistics 11(1), 143–89.Google Scholar
Schlücker, Barbara. 2013. Non-classifying compounds in German. Folia Linguistica 47, 449–80.Google Scholar
Ström Herold, Jenny & Levin, Magnus. 2018. English supplementive ing-clauses and their German and Swedish correspondences. In Signe Oksefjell Ebeling & Hilde Hasselgård (eds.), Corpora et comparatio linguarum: Textual and contextual perspectives (Special issue). Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies 9(1), 115–38.Google Scholar
Svenska skrivregler. 2017. Stockholm: Liber.Google Scholar
Teleman, Ulf, Andersson, Erik & Hellberg, Staffan. 1999. Svenska Akademiens Grammatik. Stockholm: Norstedts.Google Scholar
Zifonun, Gisela. 2010. Von Bush administration zu Kohl-Regierung: Englische Einflüsse auf deutsche Nominalkonstruktionen? In Scherer, Carmen & Holler, Anke (eds.), Strategien der Integration und Isolation nicht-nativer Einheiten und Strukturen, 165–82. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar