Semantic Transfer in Nominal Compounds as an Obstacle to Transfer of Meaning

The theoretical approach the paper is based on is cognitive lexical semantics and its view that a word’s conventional meaning is a just a prompt for the process of meaning construction. The paper looks at the problem of deciding on the right interpretation of semantic relations found within nominal compounds in the process of translation. It focuses on nominal compounds that are problematic for reason of their lack of syntactic and semantic clues, i.e. their semantic ambiguity. The added difficulty is that the extra-linguistic information that could help solve the problem is not always available. The corpus is composed of various documents considered as typical examples of the so called institutional language, which is rich in pre-packaged concepts often expressed by nominal compounds. While the analysis does not strive to offer a set of rules for disambiguation of nominal compounds, the author hopes that by pointing to examples of underspecified syntactic or semantic representations students of translation may be cautioned about such obstacles in their own translation