This book focuses on the translation of English academic texts into German, closely analysing the structural and discourse properties of original sentences and their possible translations. It consists of six chapters, with more than a hundred carefully discussed examples, and presents the author's results of a series of research projects which have successively dealt with the typologically determined conditions for discourse-appropriate uses of word order, case, voice (perspective) and structural explicitness in simple and complex sentences or sequences of sentences.

The theoretical and methodological assumptions of the book follow a basically generative approach in studying the interaction between semantic-pragmatic and phonological-syntactic properties of the linguistic forms as they are involved in the perception of written language. The linguistic and psycholinguistic models accessed are also introduced in detail to promote comprehension for the interested reader with an alternative theoretical background, whether scholar, student or translator.

Table of contents

Preface vii–ix Introduction xi–xxi 1. Theoretical and methodological aspects of basic concepts 1–33 2. Discourse-appropriate distribution of information in different classes of English and German sentences 35–71 3. The translation of nominal word groups: DP-internal restructuring 73–104 4. Reorganizing dependencies 105–130 5. Cross-sentential restructuring of NPs and prospective relevance 131–157 6. Retrospective and prospective aspects of structural propensities 159–183 References 185–192 Index 193–196