Transcript Teaching ESL Vocabulary

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?
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“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?
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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
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Examples of collocations
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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?
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a stiff breeze but not a stiff wind (while either a strong
breeze or a strong wind is okay).
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Collocational meaning (1)
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Collocational meaning refers to the
associations that a word acquires in its
collocation:
e.g.
pretty
girl
boy
woman
flower
garden
colour
village
handsome
boy
man
car
overcoat
airline
typewriter
vessel
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Collocational meaning (2)
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A word can gain different collocational meaning in
different contexts:
e.g.
green on the job
green fruit
green with envy
white man
white wine
white noise
white coffee
These different meanings of “green” and “white”are
polysemous but they are caused by the different
collocation, i.e. the change in verbal context
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Criteria for collocations
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Typical criteria for collocations:
- non-compositionality
- non-substitutability
- non-modifiability.
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Collocations usually cannot be translated into
other languages word by word.
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A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not
consecutive (as in the example knock . . . door).
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Non-compositionality
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A phrase is compositional if the meaning can
predicted from the meaning of the parts.
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A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning cannot
be predicted from the meaning of the parts
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e.g. new companies
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 noncompositionality. e.g. to hear it through the
grapevine.
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Non-substitutability
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We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the
components of a collocation.
e.g. We can’t 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).
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Many collocations cannot be freely modified with
additional lexical material or through grammatical
transformations (Non-modifiability).
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E.g. white wine, but not whiter wine
mother in law, but not mother in laws
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Linguistic Subclasses of
Collocations
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Light verbs:
- Verbs with little semantic content like make, take and
do.
- e.g. make lunch, take easy,
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Verb particle constructions
- e.g. to go down
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Proper nouns
- e.g. Bill Clinton
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Terminological expressions refer to concepts and
objects in technical domains.
- e.g. Hydraulic oil filter
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Collocations at a distance
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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 Donaldson’s
door
- a man knocked on the metal front door
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Finding collocations
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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
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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
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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
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Understanding the idioms
English idioms with no equivalent in Italian
Understanding when idioms are marked
(“you’re 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?
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I’m under the weather
to wear your heart on your sleeve
red herring
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Idioms - characteristics (2)
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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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Dictionaries
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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
Please ask Sara Laviosa which ones
she recommends
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