Abstract :
[en] 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’ (Authors 1). However, Dutch has a stronger tendency towards compounding than French (among others, Authors 2). 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 (Authors 1, Authors 2) 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 will be 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).
Our study will further investigate the effects of complexity and frequency, besides source-language interference, involved in the choices of the novice translators, in line with the viewpoint that linguistic decisions of translators “should be analyzed as a multifactorial phenomenon rather than a monofactorial one (Beveren, De Sutter & Colleman 2018; see also De Sutter & Lefer 2016; Kruger 2018).
