Faderns orättvisa behandling : zur Übersetzung deutscher Genitivattribute ins Schwedische

One of the characteristics of German scientific language is the frequent use of noun phrases containing multiple modifiers. A common type of modifier in German scientific writing is the NP modifier in genitival case. Although not uncommon in the Swedish language, these so-called genitival modifiers are found more frequently in German texts, not only because of the grammatical differences between the two languages, but also due to the German preference for a more nominal writing style. This study focuses on the translation of German genitival modifiers into Swedish. The first aim of the study was to determine which syntactic structures can be used to translate German genitival modifiers into Swedish, as well as to establish the most frequently used translation structure or structures. The second aim was to identify the factors that prevented the direct transfer of a genitival modifier. For the purposes of this study, a section of Wolfgang Mertens popular scientific book Traum und Traumdeutung was translated into Swedish, after which it was analyzed with the above-mentioned aims in mind. The study has shown that about a third of the genitival modifiers found in the source text were translated using prepositional modifiers. Another third were translated with a corresponding Swedish genitival modifier. For the translation of the remaining genitival modifiers six additional types of structures were used. The main factors that prevented a direct translation were the grammatical inability to use certain types of genitival modifiers in the target language as well as the preference of the target language for more verbal expressions