ABSTRACT
This chapter constitutes the material for all or part of a practical. It focuses on translation issues raised by nominal expressions. A nominal expression either consists of a noun or has a noun as its nucleus. Here are some examples, each with an alternative avoiding use of a noun:
We shall use the term nominalization to denote the use of a nominal expression which, in the same language or another, could be replaced by an expression not containing a noun. Italian often uses nominal expressions where English would not. An English TT that matches an Italian ST noun for noun tends to read unidiomatically, having a static and abstract quality at odds with the Englishspeaker’s habitual way of expressing the world. Whether such exoticism is or is not desirable depends, of course, on the purpose of the TT. Our aim here is simply to show that nominalization can have implications for idiomaticity, register and genre.
