A study of the translation of premodifiers in an academic text

Abstract: The past century has brought with it many changes to the English language. One of these is the drastic increase in complex nominal phrases, particularly premodifiers. This implies difficulties for translators, whose target languages may not have evolved in the same way, and who must then find other solutions. The aim of this essay is to investigate which kind of premodifier is most frequent in an academic text in English, and how the different kinds of premodifiers are translated into Swedish. Since the language pairs share many similarities, it was expected that many of the shorter premodifiers will keep their structure when translated. However, since Swedish cannot recreate the longer and more complex noun phrases, nor add multiple noun premodifiers in succession, it is also expected that several of the English premodifiers will be restructured into other constructions.The results show that the majority of the adjective/participial premodifiers kept their structure when translated into Swedish, and the tendency to restructure them into postmodifiers was low. Noun premodifiers were more likely to be restructured into postmodifiers, especially when they were more complex, though most of the noun premodifiers were restructured into compound nouns. The hyphenated premodifiers were the most likely to be restructured into different constructions, especially postmodifiers.In conclusion, since Swedish and English are similar in structure, many of the premodifiers were quite straightforward in translation, but several, especially longer and more complex noun phrases, can pose problems for a translator.