On the translation of Germannoun phrases with extended modifiers in non-fiction into Swedish

One of the main characteristics of German technical language is the nominal style, which includes complex pre-nominal and post-nominal extended modifiers. A commonly held view is that these are less common in Swedish due to language-specific restrictions and preferences. As such, they may pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This essay examines this particular problem and focuses on the translation of four different complex extended modifiers: adjectival, participial, genitival and prepositional.The aim of this study was to determine which syntactic structures are used when these modifiers are translated into Swedish and to identify shifts using the concept “grammatical metaphor”, thereby focusing on the degree of grammatical metaphoricity. For the purposes of this study, a chapter of the technical book Neues Bauen mit Stroh in Europa by Gruber, Gruber and Sentler was translated into Swedish and then analysed with the above-mentioned aims in mind.The study showed that out of the 117 noun phrases with extended complex modifiers in the source text 21 were transposed into a less explicit, direct structure and more metaphorical language. The metaphorization was in some cases a result of simplification/omission of less dense semantic material and/or the translation into compounds. In 46 cases, the extended modifiers showed the same degree of grammatical metaphoricity as the source language expression and thus were re-metaphorized. In the remaining cases, a verbal or more explicit structure was chosen in the translation. This especially proved to be the case with pre-nominal extended adjectival and participial modifiers