Nominalisierungen in medizinischen Fachtexten : Eine schwedisch-deutsche Übersetzungsanalyse

Scientific language, in contrast to general language, is characterised by its abstract and implicit style of expression, known as nominal style. A typical feature of this style is the frequent use of nominalizations which tend to be more common in German than in Swedish. This study will investigate whether these differences are also present in highly specialized medical texts. The quantitative and qualitative analysis is based on the translation of two medical articles from Swedish to German. The aim is to find out how often a nominalization in the source text corresponds to a nominalization in the target text, which structural shifts occur and how they influence the degree of nominal style. For this purpose, the concept of the “grammatical metaphor” was applied. The results show that the Swedish source text contains less nominalizations than the German target text. In 30% of the cases, less explicit and more metaphorical information was conveyed in the target text. In most of these cases a Swedish verbal construction was translated into a German nominalization. The metaphorization was often optional and guided by the conventions of medical texts. 65% of the occurrences showed the same degree of grammatical metaphoricity and were thus re-metaphorized. In the remaining 5%, the target text was less explicit and thus de-metaphorized. The Swedish source text proved to be less nominal than the target text