Colloquial Swedish often contains compound words, whose first components partly or completely lose their main lexical meaning and in some cases play a role of an intensifier. The first components of such words usually are nouns such as jätte, topp, sten, kanon, bomb, skit and some others. These words don’t have analogues in Russian and thus they cannot be translated as compounds and the translator must resort to other lexical means.
The status of a word is determined by its part of speech and by the first component’s degree of de-sematization. The first component of a noun usually preserves its lexical meaning to a certain extent and performs the function of the attribute by the second component. That gives to the whole word a vivid and expressive complexion. Such words can be regarded as compounds, the more so that they are translated into Russian as a combination of adjective and noun, like most other Swedish compounds.
The first components in adjectives and adverbs are very often subject to desemantization. Their function is purely intensifying, so that they point out a higher intensity of a feature denoted by the second component. Thus, the first component of these words plays the role of an intensifying prefix, so they are unlikely to be regarded as compounds. This point of view is also proved by the fact that such words are mostly translated into Russian as one expressive adverb or adjective, but not as word combinations, like nouns.
