This study explores English noun sequences such as climate change, with a common noun modifier, and Harvard students, with a proper noun modifier, contrasting German and Swedish. The material is provided by the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS), a multi-directional 5-million word non-fiction corpus. The results show that the most common type of translation correspondence – regardless of translation direction – is the German and Swedish (solid) compound noun (world war > Weltkrieg/världskrig). When specifically focussing on English proper noun modifiers, it is, however, evident that these are less likely to produce compound nouns in translations, due to language-internal preferences in German and Swedish. Apart from the formal properties of correspondences, this study also takes semantics into account. We show that some types of semantic relations between the head and its modifying noun, such as Composition, which identifies the material of the head noun (silk cloth), are more likely to be rendered as compound nouns in German and Swedish. Amongst the non-compound correspondences in German and Swedish, post-modifying prepositional phrases are one of the more prominent alternatives (climate signal > signal från [‘from’] klimatet [Swedish]). This result is in line with our previous findings (Ström Herold and Levin, 2019; Levin and Ström Herold, 2024), suggesting that Swedish, more than German, favours post-modification. Amongst the notable translation effects, we observe how translators sometimes make the content more explicit through the addition of a noun, but also that the opposite applies.