León: Universidad de León, Área de Publicaciones, 2010
Abstract
P. 247-270English compound adjectives are a productive idiomatic resource used
to express detailed characterisation of nouns and this is particularly so
when the second item is either a present/ gerund participle (-ing) or a
past participle (-ed), as illustrated in the two examples in the title of
this paper. However, “compounding is not a process which all languages
use. Some languages, e.g. French and Spanish have little or no
compounding, while others, e.g. German and Dutch, make extensive
use of compounding.” (Bybee 1985: 106). Due to the fact that compounding
is not such a common word-formation process in a more
analytic language such as Spanish, other types of forms need to be
used in translations to express these meanings.
The corpus-based study reported on here makes use of empirical
data from a parallel corpus of contemporary English texts and their
corresponding Spanish translations: P-ACTRES.2
This paper describes the actual translation options found for
English compound adjectives in Spanish. First, the translations were
analysed to identify the translation techniques employed in each cas