Word-formation in translated language: The impact of language-pair specific features and genre variation

Abstract

Corpus-based studies in the field of word-formation have looked at translated language with the aim of (i) assessing the role of the source language (SL) in the overuse of certain derivational affixes in the target language (TL) and (ii) examining translationrelated, SL- and TL-independent trends such as the normalization of creative lexis. However, two aspects of the word-formation features of translated language remain underresearched: (i) language-pair specific properties which lead to a marked decrease in the use of certain word-forming devices in the target texts compared to their source texts (here referred to as ‘language-pair specific morphological decrease’) and (ii) the genre-sensitivity of word-forming devices in translated language. To examine these two aspects, we report on a corpus-based case study of the French translation of the Englishun- andin-prefixes. The translation data makes it possible to identify the following language-pair-related factors which are responsible for morphological decrease in French target texts: morphological productivity, diverging polysemy and partial phraseological equivalence. The study also shows that morphological decrease is significantly more frequent in fiction than in news, thereby indicating that genre also plays a major role in shaping the word-formation features of translated language.