Bollywood-loving countries and Bollywood-inspired films: English compound adjectives in Spanish translations

Abstract

English 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 case