So I recently had a question of how to translate a seemingly simple phrase which gave rise to a really puzzling dilemma. The phrase itself was "the eye which had been operated on", it was passive. However, the original language only used one single adjective + "eye", and I wanted to somehow retain that so as to not make the translation too wordy.
One option was to simply say "the treated eye", which was OK. But I also wondered whether I could use "operate" as an adjective. Which led me to 2 options: "the operated eye" and "the operated-on eye". The latter seemed to be more suitable because we normally say that surgeons "operate on" an organ/limb/tumor/... and people have operations "on" parts of their bodies, so I ought to keep the preposition. The former sounded a little ambiguous, since "operate" could be confused with "manipulated, controlled" as in a "machine which is operated from a control panel".
My question is twofold, I guess. Am I correct in thinking that phrasal verbs may be used as hyphenated phrasal adjectives and, if so, is doing so appropriate in this particular case?