La traduzione dei composti nominali tedeschi nel linguaggio medico: il caso della "dieta" Mayr

Starting from a medical treatise written by Dr. F.X. Mayr for a wide public, we focus on the German nominal compounds and analyse how they are built and how they can be translated into Italian. The investigation of the different ways the two languages convey information in nominal phrases proves that the semantic relation between the head noun and the modifying element, which is usually a noun too, is often left implicit in German, while this is seldom possible in Italian (especially in compounds of Latin and Greek origin). The interpretation of such relation is then the basis for the choice of the adjective or of the preposition which introduces the modifying noun in a complex nominal following the pattern: head noun + preposition + modifier. Finally, the suitability of these solutions is debated through the comparison with the terminology used by doctors instead of professional translators.