Creativity in translation: a case study in Dutch compounding

Dutch has a stronger tendency towards compounding than French (Van Goethem 2009). Nevertheless, 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).
In this contribution we analyze the use of Dutch compounds by French-speaking L2 learners of Dutch and French-Dutch novice translators (whose L1 is Dutch) to gain insight into their creativity in word-formation.
The learner data for this study consist of the Dutch subcorpus of MulTINCo (Meunier et al. 2020) already collected from 195 learners in French-speaking Belgium (17 years on average). The translation data will be newly collected in 2023-2024 and will include French-to-Dutch student translations from bachelor students (18-20 years) at Dutch-speaking universities in Belgium. To increase the comparability of the learner and the translator data, the students will be asked to translate the native French texts from MulTINCo into Dutch.
Results of a previous study (Authors forthc.) 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’).
Since novice translators translate into their L1, they are expected to show even more creativity in their use of compounds, while avoiding inaccurate constructions.