Analysis of the Errors in Translating Collocations into English by University Students

Collocations are defined as the way in which words are found together conventionally. Collocations are helpful in talking and writing about any topic and communicating effectively as well as making the text have a more precise meaning. Although collocations, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, are traced in all languages, its combinations of words will differ from language to language. When it comes to translation, the difference in combinations of words in languages makes the task of transferring collocations to the target language challenging. In this sense, a word for word translation usually results in incorrect products. This study aims to investigate the errors in translating collocations into English by university students. To do so, a corpus of the students’ translation assignments from Persian into English was investigated for the translations of collocations. The translations were analyzed and classified based on the model by Sadeghi and Panahifar. Data analysis revealed that adjective-noun and verb-adverb collocations were the most and the least frequently occurring types of collocations, respectively. Also, verb-preposition collocations were the least of errors, and adjective-preposition collocations consisted the most of errors. The study concluded that transformations in translation of collocation are certain and impossible to avoid where full equivalence is usually impossible.

کلیدواژه ها:

translation ، collocation ، word for word translation ، collocational errors