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In this paper of Borel it is shown that any non-trivial word is a dominant map from $G \times G$ to $G$ whenever $G$ is a compact connected semisimple Lie group. So the answer to your second question is "yes". I don't recall offhand exactly what techniques are used, but I vaguely recall that one starts with the $SL_2$ case (which contains free subgroups that one can play with) and builds up from there.