The Translation of Denominal -Ed Adjectival Compounds Into Romanian – A Matter of Explicitation

Typological differences across languages shape the translators’ choice of particular strategies when rendering syntactic and lexical structures that are ubiquitous in the source language, but highly infrequent or non-existent in the target language (Slobin 2004, 2005; Alonso 2018; Capelle 2012; Drăgan 2021; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2003, et al.). The present article explores the impact of such differences on the strategies adopted to translate English denominal -ed adjectival compounds into Romanian and the extent to which they contrive to compensate for the unavailability of said compounds in the target language. It is shown that their absence from Romanian compels translators to overwhelmingly adopt strategies that spell out the syntactic and semantic relations between the two stems of the original compounds (grammatical transposition, compensation by splitting, compensation in place, compensation in kind). Consequently, all these strategies are analyzed as instances of (obligatory) explicitation, and, thus, lend support to the view in the literature that explicitation is a universal strategy (Blum-Kulka 1986; Klaudy 2003, 2009; Klaudy Molés-Cases 2019, et al.).