International Journal of Learner Corpus Research - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2023

This paper examines how translation trainees deal with verb-noun terminological collocations when translating a legal text into their L2. The learner data is juxtaposed with professional translations of the same text and comparable non-translated documents. The results indicate that a large proportion of learner renditions is attested in the reference corpora. There is also a relatively high convergence between learners’ and experts’ choices and symmetrical variability. Unattested and inadequate equivalents demonstrate a large variability and low frequency of individual items, which suggests a lack of systematic patterns in mistranslations. The inadequacy of learner solutions is mainly caused by the choice of a collocate and results in information transfer and naturalness errors, with the former being more idiosyncratic and the latter more recurrent. In conclusion, we argue for viewing L2 collocational competence through the lens of genre requirements and professional practice rather than dichotomous categories of nativelike and non-nativelike collocations.

This article analyses the extent to which four well-known general cognitive constraints – syntactic priming, cognitive routinisation, markedness of coding and structural integration – impact the linguistic output of translation students and professional translators similarly. It takes subject placement variation in Dutch as a test case to gauge the effect of the four constraints and relies on a controlled corpus of student and professional French-to-Dutch L1 news translations, from which all declarative main clauses with either a preverbal or a postverbal subject were extracted. All corpus instances were annotated for four random variables, the fixed variable expertise and ten other fixed variables, which were considered good proxies for the cognitive constraints. A mixed-effects regression analysis reveals that by and large the cognitive constraints have an identical effect on student and professional translators’ output, with priming and structural integration having the strongest impact on subject placement. However, students diverge from professionals when translating French clauses with a left-dislocated adjunct into Dutch, which is interpreted as an indication of a difference in automatisation when dealing with specific French-Dutch cross-linguistic differences.

This paper explores the issue of variation in translation, as well as its connection with the concept of “literal translation” and translator experience, on the basis of a multiple student translation corpus containing concurrent Italian versions of the same English source text produced by 35 undergraduate and postgraduate trainee translators. Translation paradigms for preselected lexical items expected to trigger different degrees of variation are extracted and analysed to identify both recurrent and sporadic solutions, whose acceptability in the target language is assessed using the source text’s official translation, alternative professional translations and the Europarl Corpus as reference. The analysis shows that variation is most remarkable with respect to idiomatic/metaphorical and evaluative items than for non-idiomatic items, but also when a literal translation would not be possible in the target language. Translators are found to generally prefer literal translations whenever acceptable in the target language, irrespective of their degree of experience.

This paper compares use of collocations by Italian learners writing in and translating into English, conceptualising the two tasks as different modes of constrained language production and adopting Halverson’s (2017) revised Gravitational Pull Hypothesis as a theoretical model. A particular focus is placed on identifying a method for comparing datasets containing translations and essays, assembled opportunistically and varying in size and structure. The study shows that lexical association scores for dependency-defined word pairs are significantly higher in translations than essays. A qualitative analysis of a subset of collocations shared and unique to either mode shows that the former set features more collocations with direct cross-linguistic links (connectivity), and that the source/first language seems to affect both modes similarly. We tentatively conclude that second/target language salience effects are more visible in translation than second language use, while connectivity and source language salience affect both modes of bilingual processing similarly, regardless of the mediation variable.