Translating -ING Adjectival Compounds Into Romanian – A Case of Explicitation

Abstract While compounding is highly productive in English, typically joining two words in a tight-knit semantic and syntactic unit, it is a minor derivational process in Romanian, which favours affixation instead. In light of this typological difference between the two languages, the present paper investigates the translation of English -ing adjectival compounds into Romanian in order to shed light on the strategies translators employ to compensate for the general absence of compounding in the latter language. It is shown that different translation strategies produce a number of regular patterns which lean towards explicitation, though implicitation is not excluded (Blum-Kulka 1986, Klaudy 2003, 2009, Klaudy & Károly 2005 etc.).