Collocation and translation

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Collocation and translation

• MA Literary Translation- Lesson 2
• prof. Hugo Bowles
• February 2 2007

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Why do you say deep water and not profound water?

• A word is known by the company it keeps
• (JR Firth)
• - tremble with fear tremble with excitement
• - quiver with excitement quiver with fear
• There is no definable reason why we choose to say
• tremble with fear but not quiver with fear.
  It is
• simply a question of COLLOCATION.

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What is collocation?

• COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between
  words that frequently occur together
• The words together can mean more than the sum of
  their parts (The Times of India, disk drive)
• - other examples hot dog, mother in law
• Examples of collocations
• noun phrases like strong tea and weapons of mass
  destruction
• phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases
  like the rich and powerful.
• Valid or invalid?
• a stiff breeze but not a stiff wind (while either
  a strong breeze or a strong wind is okay).
• broad daylight (but not bright daylight or narrow
  darkness).

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Collocational meaning (1)

• Collocational meaning refers to the associations
  that a word acquires in its collocation
• e.g.
• girl
  boy
• boy
  man
• woman
  car
• pretty flower handsome
  overcoat
• garden
  airline
• colour
  typewriter
• village
  vessel

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Collocational meaning (2)

• A word can gain different collocational meaning
  in different contexts
• e.g.
• green on the job white man
• green fruit white wine
• green with envy white noise
• white coffee
• These different meanings of green and
  whiteare
• polysemous but they are caused by the different
• collocation, i.e. the change in verbal context

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Criteria for collocations

• Typical criteria for collocations
• - non-compositionality
• - non-substitutability
• - non-modifiability.
• Collocations usually cannot be translated into
  other languages word by word.
• A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not
  consecutive (as in the example knock . . . door).

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Non-compositionality

• A phrase is compositional if the meaning can
  predicted from the meaning of the parts.
• e.g. new companies
• A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning
  cannot be predicted from the meaning of the parts
• e.g. hot dog
• Collocations are not necessarily fully
  compositional in that there is usually an element
  of meaning added to the combination. e.g. strong
  tea.
• Idioms are the most extreme examples of
  non-compositionality. e.g. to hear it through the
  grapevine.

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Non-substitutability

• We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the
  components of a collocation.
• e.g. We cant say yellow wine instead of white
  wine even though yellow is as good a description
  of the color of white wine as white is (it is
  kind of a yellowish white).
• Many collocations cannot be freely modified with
  additional lexical material or through
  grammatical transformations (Non-modifiability).
• E.g. white wine, but not whiter wine
• mother in law, but not mother in laws

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Linguistic Subclasses of Collocations

• Light verbs
• - Verbs with little semantic content like make,
  take and do.
• - e.g. make lunch, take easy,
• Verb particle constructions
• - e.g. to go down
• Proper nouns
• - e.g. Bill Clinton
• Terminological expressions refer to concepts and
  objects in technical domains.
• - e.g. Hydraulic oil filter

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Collocations at a distance

• Many collocations occur at variable distances.
  For example knock collocates with door but at a
  distance
• - she knocked on his door
• - they knocked at the door
• - 100 women knocked on Donaldsons door
• - a man knocked on the metal front door

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Finding collocations

• Software is able to scan texts for the most
  frequently collocated words using the criterion
  of frequency, i.e. by counting the words which
  most frequently appear together
• This usually produces a lot of function words
  which need to be filtered out

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An example of a frequency count

• This shows the most frequent collocations of
  pairs of words (bigrams) in a corpus of newspaper
  articles.
• The are all function words (except New York)

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Frequency count after filtering

• This chart shows the
• most frequent collocations
• after filtering out the
• function words. The
• capital letters refer to the
• part of speech
• (A Adjective, N Noun)

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Translation problems with collocations

• Temptation to follow the english collocation (dry
  - secco gentle - gentile)
• Not understanding the meaning of the collocation
  (dry cow)
• Culture specific collocations (Union Jack)
• Understanding when collocations are marked (heavy
  gambler)
• Translating marked collocations (heavy
  non-smoker)

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Translation problems with idioms

• Understanding the idioms
• English idioms with no equivalent in Italian
• Understanding when idioms are marked (youre
  getting on my breasts)
• Translating marked idioms
• Understanding when idioms have been manipulated
  (silver linings and all that)
• Translating manipulated idioms

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Idioms - characteristics (1)

• Idioms are strictly non-compositional
• Although the word that make up the idiom have
• Their own literal meanings, in the idiom they
  have
• lost their individual identity. You canot predict
  the
• meaning of an idiom from the sum of its parts
• e.g. how do you do?
• Im under the weather
• to wear your heart on your sleeve
• red herring

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Idioms - characteristics (2)

• Structural stability (syntactic frozenness)
• 1. Constituents cannot be replaced
• e.g. as good as gold / as good as play ?
• 2. Word order cannot be changed
• e.g. tit for tat / tat for tit?
• 3. Constituents cannot be deleted or added to
• e.g. out of the question / out of question ?

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DictionariesPlease ask Sara
Laviosa which ones she recommends

• The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations
• Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of
  English
• Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms
• Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms
• Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms