Phrasal Constructions in German and their translation into Albanian: An Analysis based on Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

The article examines the translation of phraseme constructions from German into Albanian using selected examples from children’s and young adult literature, in particular Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy. In translation studies, phraseme constructions are considered a particular challenge, as they combine fixed phraseological patterns with a degree of lexical variation. While numerous empirical studies exist for larger language pairs such as German–English or German–Spanish, a systematic analysis for German–Albanian has so far been lacking. This study is based on a self-compiled mini-corpus that documents central phraseme constructions and their Albanian translations and evaluates them from a functional-contrastive perspective. The findings show that German phraseme constructions are predominantly translated into Albanian through functional adaptation and semantic modulation. Direct equivalences are rare, whereas culturally embedded idioms exhibit idiomatic parallels in Albanian more often than expected. This ensures comprehensibility in the target text, but the rhetorical conciseness of the original is partly weakened. The study makes a first contribution to contrastive phraseology for the German–Albanian language pair and highlights practice-oriented implications for translator training.