English Attributive Compounds as a Means of Structural Compression in Academic Discourse from a Translation Perspective

The paper studies English attributive compounds as a means of sentence compression in academic discourse. They transform multi-component structures with complex and diverse syntactic relationships into compact units, which are extremely frequent in English-language academic discourse. The high prevalence of these constructions, coupled with the lack of comprehensive description of various types of multi-component hyphenated attributive formations and their functional peculiarities in scientific texts, makes the task of describing such units highly relevant. The aim of this study is to identify the specific features of using structures with secondary predication — English attributive compounds — in academic discourse from a translation standpoint. The empirical corpus of 628 occurrences of attributive compounds from English-language scientific articles on the ScienceDirect.com platform covering the following fields: medical and engineering research, sociology and pedagogy. The research methodology involved a pre-translation analysis of the empirical data from a structural-semantic perspective, followed by an analysis of their translations to identify correlation principles between Russian and English structures. As a result, two main groups of hyphenated attributive phrases were identified: 1) stable models with fixed component functions (complex modifiers), 2) occasional structures (attributive chains). The absence of attributive chains and the low frequency of complex modifiers in Russian necessitate significant structural transformations in translation. A comparison of translations for attributive compounds, drawn from parallel texts on Linguee.ru and Reverso.net, allowed for conclusions about the most frequent translation strategies for each group of compounds in different scientific fields. In engineering/medical texts, calquing (for terminology) and using Russian nominal groups are quite common, which is dictated by the requirements of the stylistic register. In sociology/pedagogy texts, the most frequent strategies for rendering complex modifiers into Russian are expanding the attributive predication into a participial phrase and using a verbal noun. Cases where predicativity is omitted in the translation of attributive compounds into Russian have also been identified and systematized.