Menzel, Katrin
Noun + noun Compounds and Verbal Complements as Non-normalised Features in Late Modern English Scientific Translations
Proceedings of 7th Translation in Transition Conference, Batumi: Shota Rustaveli State University, 2024.
This paper presents a study on the usage of noun+noun compounds and verbal complement structures in 18th century scientific articles in the Royal Society Corpus (RSC) comparing translated to non-translated English texts. Departing from the hypothesis that the translations will conform stronger to traditional patterns of the English language, the analysis shows that these historical translations and non-translated texts are similarly marked by the ongoing reorganisation of the noun phrase, but translations
contain more innovative complementation patterns. Additionally, a surprisal analysis shows that the analysed patterns tend to occur in more predictable and conventionalised contexts in non-translated texts than in translation.