Translating English compound adjectives into Italian: Problems and strategies

Abstract

The paper deals with English compound adjectives, seen as a problem when translating into Italian because of the typological differences between the two languages. In English, they are quantitatively numerous, show a wide range of morphological patterns and a high degree of productivity. In Italian, they constitute a small number of items exhibiting a very limited set of productive morphological patterns. The study is based on a corpus of selected types of compound adjectives extracted manually from Under the Dome (2009) by Stephen King and their renderings in the Italian translation (2010). The aim is to analyse the translation strategies adopted and to determine if any regularities can be detected, when translating each type of adjective.