Super-creative and over-bureaucratic: A cross-genre corpus-based study on the use and translation of evaluative prefixation in TED talks and EU parliamentary debates

Abstract

Corpus-based cross-linguistic studies that have examined the word-formation features of source vs. target texts and non-translated vs. translated language have found that source-language interference and language-pair specific properties noticeably influence the over- and underuse of certain affixes in the target language. They have also highlighted translation-related trends such as the normalization of creative lexis, which may lead to a marked morphological decrease in target texts vis-à-vis their source texts. This article sets out to investigate another facet of the word-formation features of source and target texts, viz. genre-sensitivity, by reporting on a case study of evaluative prefixation in English and French (e.g. mini-, super-, over-). The study is based on two translation corpora (TED Talks and Europarl), representing two spoken genres (oral presentations and parliamentary debates) and two written translation modes (subtitling and translation). The results show that English evaluative prefixation fulfills different functions in the two genres investigated (attitudinal stance in debates vs. intensification in presentations). Translation data also reveal striking differences between the two corpora, with TED Talks displaying a strong preference towards prefix-by-prefix translation. However, at this stage, it is difficult to assess to what extent this is due to source text genre, translation mode or translator expertise (TED Talks are subtitled by non-professional volunteers).