Publication details
On Translating Collocations : A Corpus-based Approach
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Collocations are known to be the stumbling block for non-native speakers since different languages do not always combine words in the same way. Writing and translation are most affected. According to Newmark (1988:32): "the chief difficulties in translating are lexical, not grammatical, i.e. words, collocations and fixed phrases or idioms". He further maintains that the translator either does not understand an expression or finds it difficult to translate. For this reason, language learners should be encouraged to use translation when acquiring new collocations to create a "mental link" between the two languages. With the advent of corpora and sophisticated concordance tools, it is now possible to supplement bilingual dictionaries which usually focus on single words and mostly do not provide the required information. The paper strives to present a concise explanation of the procedures that can be used to help budding translators avoid the pitfalls encountered when translating collocations. These procedures include exploring large parallel corpora available for many language pairs via parallel concordancing and bilingual word sketches (i.e. one-page summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour). |
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