The parameter
Compounding joins existing words into a new one. Every language has the process in some form, so the useful question is not whether a language compounds but how freely and how deep. Two variables move independently: productivity, whether a speaker can coin a compound on the spot for a thing just named, and depth, how many members can stack before the result stops being readable.
German, Dutch and Finnish are high on both. Modern Greek is productive but characteristically binary, joining two stems with a linking vowel rather than stacking six. English compounds nouns productively and tolerates three or four members in technical registers, but its ceiling is lower than German's. French, Spanish and Italian reach for a phrase first. Orthography is regularly mistaken for the parameter itself: English writes some compounds solid, some hyphenated and some open, and one word on the page says little about whether the language treats it as a unit.
What matters for translation sits inside the compound. The semantic relation between the members is not expressed. Olive oil is oil made from olives; baby oil is oil applied to babies; the two have the same shape and opposite relations, and only knowledge of the world separates them. A language with deep compounding leaves a great deal unstated, and leaves it unstated in exactly the units that carry the most technical weight.
How languages vary
- Highly productive compounding: compounds are coined freely and stack to several members. German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Hungarian.
- Restricted compounding: productive but shallow, usually two members, often with a linking element. Modern Greek with the linking vowel -o-; Turkish, where a noun-noun compound carries the marker -(s)I on its second member; English, productive but with a low ceiling.
- Phrasal strategies dominant: the default for a complex concept is a phrase with a preposition or a genitive. French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic.
No standard reference measures compounding productivity across a balanced language sample, so there is no distribution figure to cite. The typological surveys report compounding as close to universal as an available process and sharply unequal in how much work it is asked to do. Figures quoted for this parameter are usually corpus counts for one language.
Consequences for translation
Translating a deep compound out of German, Dutch or Finnish is not a lexical operation. The compound has to be unpacked into a phrase, which is a unit shift, and its content spread across several words in a different order, which is a distribution change. Neither is optional.
The unpacking forces an interpretation. Because the relation between the members is unexpressed, the translator has to select a preposition, and the preposition is more specific than the compound was. A German Zuständigkeitsübertragung becomes a transfer of responsibility, a transfer of jurisdiction or a delegation of competence, and the target text is now committed to a reading the source withheld. This is why compound-heavy administrative prose is slower than its word count suggests: few words, many decisions.
The reverse direction is easier and more dangerous. A target language with productive compounding can fold an English noun phrase into one word that reads as native drafting, but the compound hides the relation again, so a translator unsure of the source's intent can compound the problem away rather than resolve it.
Three practical consequences follow. Word counts diverge asymmetrically: one German word routinely becomes four or five English ones, so source-word and target-word quotations price the same job differently. Terminology work degrades, because compounds are where new terms surface first and a term base search for a six-member compound returns nothing even though every member is listed. And revision has a blind spot: a reviser reading only the target sees a well-formed phrase, with no signal that the relation inside it was chosen.
Examples
DE>EN
- Source: Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung
- Target: Regulation on the transfer of responsibility for land transaction permits
- Comment: Six nouns in one word, in force in Berlin from December 2003 to November 2007. English needs ten words and three prepositions, each stating a relation the German left implicit. The shift is compulsory; the prepositions are interpretation.
EN>NL
- Source: insurance against incapacity for work
- Target: arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekering
- Comment: The compression direction. Dutch names the concept in one word, which is what the register expects, and the five-word phrase would read as a translation. Nothing is lost, but the relation between the three notions is now carried by the reader.
TR>EN
- Source: nüfus cüzdanı
- Target: identity card
- Comment: Turkish compounds two nouns and marks the compound on the second member. A literal rendering, population booklet, is transparent and useless. Compounds in official terminology resolve to a named object, not a gloss of their parts.
References
- Lieber, R. & Štekauer, P. (eds.) (2009). The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Štekauer, P., Valera, S. & Kőrtvélyessy, L. (2012). Word-Formation in the World's Languages: A Typological Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Ralli, A. (2013). Compounding in Modern Greek. Dordrecht: Springer.
- Bauer, L. (2003). Introducing Linguistic Morphology, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.