“Abseits ist, wenn der Schiedsrichter pfeift“ : Probleme beim Übersetzen der Fußballterminologie eines deutschen Regeltextes ins Schwedische

The purpose of this essay is to investigate problems that arise when translating a German football text into Swedish. The qualitative study focuses on football terminology, as this is central to the language of football. Special attention was paid to synonymous terms, collocations, Anglicisms, metaphors, and metonymies. Various parallel texts and football dictionaries were consulted during the translation. Also, Koller's (2011) model of translation correspondences was used in order to systematize the findings. The analysis showed that when dealing with synonymous terms, different kinds of translation problems occurred due to correspondence type. For example, in cases where source text terms had only one correspondence in the target language, the target text inevitably became more repetitive than the source text. On the contrary, when a source-text term had several correspondences, many translation alternatives needed to be considered in order to choose the appropriate term in the specific target-text context. Concerning the translation of collocations, the analysis showed that interference may pose a problem even when translating into one's native language. As for the translation of Anglicisms, most of them could not be preserved in the target text, and, thus, needed to be replaced by existing Swedish equivalents. This occasionally turned out to be problematic, for instance when no direct equivalent could be found in the target language. On the contrary, many of the terms based on metaphorical concepts such as FOOTBALL IS WAR could be preserved, indicating that German and Swedish football language use this concept to a similar extent