Collocations in Translated Language: Combining Parallel, Comparable and Reference Corpora

The paper describes an attempt at investigating some collocational properties of translated language. The notion of collocation is one of the cornerstones of corpus linguistics, and has been the subject of substantial speculation and empirical research (section 2.1). Within translation studies, few works have tackled this issue, partly because of methodological conundrums (section 2.2). Yet collocations – and idiomaticity in general – would seem to be relevant to the “elucidation of the nature of translated text as a mediated communicative event” (Baker, 1993: 243), and thus central to corpus-based translation studies. The paper claims that the research questions regarding collocations in translated language posed so far need to be reframed in order to avoid the methodological problems faced by previous studies. The method devised to answer these questions is described in some detail (section 3), and a case study is presented (section 4) of a single phraseological pattern in translated and original Italian fiction texts (Noun preposition|conjunction Noun). Section 5 concludes the paper and makes suggestions for further research.