The article focuses on nominalization as grammatical metaphor and on its translation
from Italian to Slovene. It would seem that grammatical metaphor is more frequent in
certain languages than in others. With the use of Italian and Slovene monolingual corpora
and especially with the aid of an Italian-Slovene parallel corpus, this hypothesis
has been tested and other related phenomena have been analysed, such as the different
distribution of nominalizations in different text types and the influence of lexical density
on the acceptability of a translation.
After a brief definition of nominalization, a study on the frequency of nominalization
in the FIDA and La Repubblica corpora is presented. The results are compared with an
analysis of the frequency of nominalization in the Italian-Slovene parallel corpus ISPAC.
Afterwards, the presence of nominalization is also verified in the two sub-corpora of ISPAC,
containing literary and non-literary texts, in order to assess the results against the
hypothesis that, historically, the origins of grammatical metaphor lie in the emergence of
scientific discourse. Next we concentrate on the element of lexical density and its influence
on the acceptability of Slovene translations compared to original texts. The difficulty of
translating texts loaded with nominalizations in Slovene is aggravated by the frequent
use, in Italian, of non-finite verb forms, which constitute another problematic area in translation. Finally, the strategies used by the translators of the texts collected in the ISPAC
corpus are analysed. Apart from the most straightforward version with a nominalization
being translated as a nominalization, a congruent translation (i.e. one using a verb to
realize a process) of a metaphorically worded process in Italian is the most common option,
while there are also several other possibilities that seem to occur regularly, such as
adjectival or adverbial metaphorical realizations.
