A comparative study of culture, semantics and pragmatics in a translation of German compound nouns into Swedish

This study discusses possible strategies when translating compound nouns from Germanto Swedish. The source text, which is also the basis for the analysis, is an informative text describing the everyday life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The aim is to render an answer to the question how culture-specific compound nouns, referring to apartially extinct culture, can be translated in a manner striving to preserve both culture specific semantics as well as pragmatics. The analysis of the compound nouns extracted from the source text takes into consideration if the nouns are lexically established or not, also if they are GDR-culture specific or not. Translatory strategies are stipulated, primarily based on Aixelá’s (1996) gradual scale of intercultural manipulation, and a comparison between the translatory strategies, applied to the compound nouns is then undertaken. The results rendered in this study suggest, that communicative translation, to a certain extent, allows word-for-word translation to antecede paraphrase, both in translation of culture-specific compound nouns as well as in translation of general compound nouns. It is also suggested that a majority of the translations are undertaken with a low degree of intercultural manipulation, thus allowing as much semantic and pragmatic content as possible to be transferred to the target text. Nevertheless, it is most likely that there will always be a certain amount of semantic and pragmatic loss. This is due to the fact that the receiver of the target text supposedly has a different cultural intuition than the sender