The ROLE OF COLLOCATION IN TRANSLATIONESE (original) (raw)

1990, University of Tarbiat Modarres

As the amount of translation across languages has tremendously increased during the last forty years, and the pre-theoretical discussions of the ‘art of translation’ has not provided a satisfactory basis for the field of translation, linguistic theories have come to the help of translation. ‘Collocation’ is one of the linguistic concepts which can be usefully applied to translation theory. The Iranian critics in the field of translation have mentioned and criticized ‘awkward and unintelligible combinations of words’, i.e. unacceptable collocations, as a major factor in artificial language-the ‘translationese’ (Nida and Taber, 1969) fabricated by some Iranian translators (see Saffarzadeh, 1984; derakhshan, 1988). The research questions of this study were: 1. What are the collocation-types? 2. Which are the most frequent types of unacceptable collocations? 3. What are the causes (or sources) of unacceptable collocations? 4. Which method of, or approach to, translation may create unacceptable collocations? 5. How can the translator avoid collocational clashes, or unacceptable collocations? The general hypothesis of the research was that a collocationally acceptable lexical sequence in the SL may be rendered into an unacceptable and anomalous lexical combination in the TL due to difference between the collocational meanings (or possibilities) of a lexeme and those of its equivalents in TL, even though having the same or identical referential (denotative) and emotive (connotative) meanings. To provide answer to the above questions, actual data were gathered from seven translations of two English novels and their corresponding original versions on unacceptable collocations. The data collected in this way provided a source of materials for three types of multiple-choice tests which were given to four groups of subjects. A taxonomy was provided to classify and represent types of unacceptable collocations. These major types of causes were distinguished: 1. Non-observance of collocational possibilities in the TL; i.e. mainly those collocations in which a collocate is used in one of its secondary (or figurative) sense in the SL, while the translator has provided the equivalents for its primary sense, rather than a different equivalent for its secondary (or figurative) sense. 2. Mistranslation; 3. Type-setting errors. The majority of senses were of the first type which confirmed the hypothesis. The most frequent types of unacceptable collocations found in the study were: 1. Adjective + Noun 2. Subject + Verb 3. Noun + of/’s + Noun It was concluded from the study that though word-for-word method of translation is the main source of creating unacceptable collocations and translationese, there are certain other lower levels involved; such as, morpheme-for-morpheme translation, transliteration, and the importation of foreign words. From the tests given to about 120 subjects, a significant conclusion was derived as: those students who compared the Persian sentences with the English original sentences, were under the negative impact (or interference) of the English language, the SL, and deviated from the naturalness (of the Persian way of expression) according to such interference.