Translating Phrasal Verbs

Various types of phrasal and prepositional verbs (e.g. make up, look after, put up with) are a characteristic and rather frequent feature of modern English. German has superficially similar verbal types, the particle verbs (or so-called separable verbs), e.g. anbrennen, ubereinkommen. Furthermore, (inseparable) prefix verbs, for instance durchleben, uberdenken, also bear some resemblance to the English structures. Here translations of English phrasal verbs in the Chemnitz English- German Translation Corpus are analyzed in order to examine whether the similar structures in both languages are a help or a hindrance to translation (false vs. true friends). Translators’ strategies found comprise translations by (i.) separable verbs, (ii.) inseparable verbs, (iii.) simplex verbs, (iv.) paraphrases or (v.) complete omission. Translation by separable and inseparable is by far the most common approach, often also using the most literal translation variant for verb and/or particle/prefix. Moreover, this strategy works well in the majority of cases, indicating that the German and English structures do indeed share semantic and structural properties which make them good translation equivalents.