Composti nominali e Leichte Sprache: strategie di semplificazione ed impatto semantico

The present contribution aims at investigating rendering strategies of compound nouns (noun + noun) in Leichte Sprache, a simplified variety of German. At first, the main aspects of composition in German and its potential sources of difficulty are discussed. The subsequent empirical analysis is based on five speeches given by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and their transpositions in Leichte Sprache. All the compounds in the source texts are identified and opposed to the corresponding expressions in the target texts in order to postulate a typology of the main rendering strategies (substitution or reduction of single elements; type of paraphrase of the underlying semantic relation). Finally, the various expressions are analyzed in terms of possible semantic changes and losses.