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Article published In:
Learner translation corpus research
Guest-edited by Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 9:1] 2023
► pp. 29–60

Terminological collocations in trainee and professional legal translations

A learner-corpus study of L2 company law translations

| University of Warsaw
| University of Warsaw

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.

Keywords: terminological collocations, legal phraseology, legal translation, L2 translation, learner translation corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Approaches to collocations
    • 2.2Legal terms and collocations: Terminological collocations
    • 2.3Collocations in L1 and L2 translation
    • 2.4L2 collocations: Evidence from second language acquisition and use
    • 2.5Research questions
  • 3.Corpus design
  • 4.Procedure
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Learner vs. professional translations
    • 5.2Unattested learner collocations in the supplementary reference corpora and other sources
    • 5.3Qualitative analysis of selected learner collocations
      • 5.3.1Unattested learner collocations: Error categories
      • 5.3.2Professional collocations not triggered in learner translations
      • 5.3.3Syntactic variation of learner collocations
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.22008.len
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