COMPOUND ADJECTIVES IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE AND GERMAN-LANGUAGE WRITTEN MASS MEDIA TEXTS: LINGUISTIC AND TRANSLATION ASPECT

Abstract

Compounds have been investigated in linguistics for quite a long time now (approximately since the middle of the XX century), and there are numerous papers researching different aspects of this linguistic phenomenon today. This fact alone testifies to the complex and ambiguous nature of compounds. This article dwells upon one particular problem in this spectrum: it investigates compound adjectives in English- and German-language media texts and their translation into Russian. The first part raises basic theoretical problems related to compounds: the choice of terminology, the essence of the concept itself and the criteria used for compounds. The analysis is based on the works by prominent Russian and foreign researches, such as N. V. Arzhantseva, I. V. Arnold, O. Jespersen, E. A. Nida, A. I. Smirnitsky, R. Quirk. The second part systematises functions and stylistic features of compounds based on the previous theoretical research, with nomination, pursuing economy principle and expressing emotions and evaluation among them. It also deals with frequency of realization of the above-mentioned functions in contemporary written media texts. We analysed English- and German-language articles from different online magazines that were translated into Russian by http://inosmi.ru/, described the translations of compound adjectives used, with their stylistic properties. It is noteworthy that no research works on translating compounds with regard to these features has been conducted yet. In this section, we analysed the choice of equivalents, concentrating on the preservation of stylistic and functional properties of the original units, which brought us to conclusions about the problems translators face when working with compounds. It also enabled us to speculate on possible ways of handling these problems.