Phraseological Patterns in Specialised Translation: Improving the Quality of Translated Texts

This paper reports on the results of a study that sets out to determine how the use of corpus-based translation practice can help students to improve their use of phraseological patterns in the translation of specialised texts. Using appropriate collocations in the translated text is potentially a problem area for a translator due to interference from the source language (Hatim and Mason 1990: 204). Consequently, one of the main criteria to determine the quality of a translation is the correct use of phraseology in the translated text (Colson 2008: 201). In research into phraseology, Corpus Linguistics is predominant as a methodology since CL tools provide the means to identify “association patterns” (Biber et al. 1998: 5) in language and since CL has an interest in recurring patterns in texts (cf. Olohan 2004; Kenny 1998). This paper investigates the possible benefits of using Corpus Linguistics tools and concepts to build ad hoc materials to help students to improve their use of phraseology in specialised translation. The research aimed, first of all, at identifying the key problem areas for the students as regards, specifically, the translation of collocational patterns of specialised and semi-specialised terms in the fields of economics, management and tourism. The focus of the study was on the translation of prepositional phrases, multi-word terms, term-embedding collocations and on the use of pre- and post-modification in the phraseological patterns. The results provide evidence in favour of an integration between translation and Corpus Linguistics for students of specialised translation. Moreover, learning about Corpus Linguistics tools has the additional benefit for the students of having an effective means to support them when translating any kind of phraseological pattern in a specialised domain (cf. Murphy and Seracini 2017: 168).