“Grow over one’s head” – Translating an idiom-based wordplay from Swedish into Romanian

Abstract

In this article a selected number of Swedish and Romanian idioms are discussed andanalyzed from different point of views. Starting from one Swedish verbal idiom – växa någon överhuvudet (‘grow over one’s head’) – used in a wordplay in a Swedish authentic text and itstranslation in Romanian, the discussion goes on to examine the strategy chosen by the translatorsand a potential equivalent in Romanian of the Swedish original idiom. The proposed equivalent iscompared with yet another Swedish idiom. The differences and the similarities of the threecompared idioms – according to structures, semantics, to the character of the semantic roles andthe metaphorical meaning of them – are discussed. Thus the article deals both with translation andphraseological studies intertwined with contrastive linguistics.

Keywords

• verbal idiom
• translation
• wordplay
• Romanian
• Swedish
• equivalent
• semantic role