Describing scent : On the translation of hyphenated premodifiers in a text about perfume

Abstract: This small-scale study examines the translation of a text about perfumes, focusing on how hyphenated premodifiers in the English source text were translated into Swedish. A quantitative analysis was carried out, where the various premodifying structures present in the source text were identified and categorized according to their individual constituents and frequencies of the various categories were calculated. A similar analysis was also performed regarding the corresponding structures found in the Swedish target text. The results were then compared to and contrasted with other recent studies. In the qualitative analysis, individual examples from the text were analysed more in depth, and the consequences of the translation choices made were discussed. The results demonstrated that English hyphenated premodifiers showed a great deal of structural variety. The most frequent structures were nouns occurring in the left-hand position and ed-participles occurring the right-hand position. A large majority of the hyphenated premodifiers were short, with only 5.5% consisting of three words or more. The results also showed that the most frequent corresponding structure in the Swedish target text were compound adjectives, which comprised 48.1% of all examples. The results of the qualitative analysis pointed at a tendency towards explication, especially when hyphenated premodifiers were restructured to postmodifying phrases and clauses. Furthermore, a tendency to simplify the hyphenated modifiers during the translation process was noted, especially when translating longer, phrasal modifiers. It was noted that many hyphenated premodifiers in the ST were metaphorical in nature. This was sometimes, but not always, also the case in the corresponding TT phrases.