Title: Translating Dutch and German noun phrases: similarities and contrasts
Abstract: In this paper we present a recently begun corpus-based research project which focuses on patterns in the translation of noun phrases with a nominal compound as head in the language pair German–Dutch. This research topic, which has rarely been the subject of investigation so far, not only reveals interesting divergences between two closely related languages in system and usage (Campe 2008), it also has implications for the debate over so-called translation universals (Van de Velde 2011). In the first part of the paper, we discuss the research questions that drive the project, beginning with asymmetries in the productivity of nominal composition in both languages. Although nominal composition is generally productive in Germanic (Gaeta & Schlucker, eds., 2012), it is more productive in German than in Dutch (Huning & Schlucker 2010). That is why German compounds may be translated by means of alternative (e.g. adjectival or prepositional) constructions in Dutch translation, sometimes with accompanying differences in meaning (De Metsenaere & Van de Velde 2013). But what about the reverse direction: how are Dutch noun phrases translated into German? Why does the Dutch translation sometimes opt for a noun phrase with a nominal compound as head when there is no compound in the German source text? Are the differences in meaning the same in both directions? In the second part of our paper, we discuss the methodology of the project and some early results and implications. The empirical basis of the project is a recently compiled bidirectional parallel literary corpus of German and Dutch fictional texts. All German and Dutch noun phrases are extracted from the corpus and systematically compared to their respective translations. The original language texts are used as a comparable corpus, revealing tendencies that are specific to translated language in either direction. At a later stage of the project, non-fictional texts will be analysed and compared to the results of the present, early stage (cf. Becher 2011, Lefer 2012).
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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