Creativity and explicitation in translation: a case study in Dutch compounding
(2024) Linguists’ Day 2024 of the Linguistic Society of Belgium — Location: Université de Mons (11.October.2024)
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- In both Dutch and French, morphological and syntactic patterns are available to build multi-word expressions: for instance, Du. wetenschapsbeleid ‘science policy’ vs wetenschappelijk beleid ‘scientific policy’ (Booij 2019) or Fr. village(-)vacances vs village de vacances ‘holiday resort’ (Van Goethem & Amiot 2019). However, Dutch has a stronger tendency towards compounding than French (among others, Van Goethem 2009). Little attention has been paid so far to the impact of such cross-linguistic differences on the use of compounds in the L2 and in translation, even though word-formation awareness has been proven crucial for learners’ L2 proficiency and creativity (Balteiro 2011), and constitutes an important factor in producing target-like translations (Lefer 2012). Results from a previous study on learner data in the MulTINCo corpus from 195 learners in French-speaking Belgium (Meunier et al. 2020, Hendrikx & Van Goethem 2024) indicate that French-speaking learners of Dutch overuse phrasal structures in contexts where a compound should be used (e.g. lessen van zwembad ‘classes from swimming pool’ instead of zwemlessen ‘swimming classes’), as expected based on the cross-linguistic differences between French and Dutch. However, the corpus results also show that learners produce different types of creative compounds, such as compounds in cases where a simplex word is appropriate (e.g. kookman ‘cookman’ instead of kok ‘chef’) or codeswitching within compounds (e.g. verjaardagsgateau ‘birthday cake’). The translation data were newly collected in 2024 and include French-to-Dutch student translations from bachelor students (18-20 years), whose L1 is Dutch, at Dutch-speaking universities in Belgium. To increase the comparability of the learner and the translator data, the students were asked to translate the native French texts from MulTINCo into Dutch. Moreover, the translator data are compared to the L1 Dutch subcorpus of MulTINCo. Preliminary findings from the translation study in this contribution suggest that novice translators frequently use compounds when they translate from French to Dutch, despite compounds being infrequent in the original French data. In cases where both the compound and its corresponding phrasal structure are acceptable in Dutch, the likelihood of compounds decreases as (i) their morphosyntactic complexity increases (e.g. zoogdierliefhebber ‘mammal lover’ vs. liefhebber van zoogdieren ‘lover of mammals’ for the original French fan de mammifères ‘fan of mammals’) and/or (ii) the compound is infrequent in Dutch (e.g. dieptevrees lit. ‘depth fear’ for the original French phobie des grandes profondeurs ‘fear of great depths’). In both conditions, translators show more creativity in their translations, possibly even translating the potential target as a full (explanatory) clause (e.g. omdat hij van zoogdieren houdt ‘because he loves mammals’). Such strategies appear to illustrate novice translators’ tendency to explicitate (Blum-Kulka 2000 [1986]; Øverås 1998). References Balteiro, Isabel. 2011. Awareness of L1 and L2 word-formation mechanisms for the development of a more autonomous L2 learner. Porta Linguarum 15. 25-34. 10 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 2000[1986]. Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader (1st edition), edited by Lawrence Venuti, 298-313. London: Routledge. Booij, Gert. 2019. The Morphology of Dutch, Second, revised edition. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press. Hendrikx, Isa & Kristel Van Goethem. 2024. Dutch compound constructions in additional language acquisition: A diasystematic-constructionist approach. Constructions and Frames, 16(1). 64-99. Lefer, Marie-Aude. 2012. Word-formation in Translated Language: The impact of Language-pair Specific Features and Genre Variation. Across Languages and Cultures, 13(2). 145–172. Meunier, Fanny, Isa Hendrikx, Amélie Bulon, Kristel Van Goethem & Hubert Naets. 2020. MulTINCo: multilingual traditional immersion and native corpus. Better-documented multiliteracy practices for more refined SLA studies. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 26(5), 572–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1786494 Øverås, Linn. 1998. In search of the third code: An investigation of norms in literary translation. Meta, 43(4). Van Goethem, Kristel. 2009. Choosing between A+N compounds and lexicalised A+N phrases: The position of French in comparison to Germanic languages. Word Structure, 2, 241-253. Van Goethem, Kristel & Dany Amiot. 2019. Compounds and multi-word expressions in French. In Barbara Schlücker (ed.), Complex lexical units: compounds and multi-word expressions, 127-152. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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Hendrikx, I., Van Praet, W., & Van Goethem, K. (2024). Creativity and explicitation in translation: a case study in Dutch compounding. Linguists’ Day 2024 of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, Université de Mons. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/245900