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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. 126–154

Comparing collocations in translated and learner language

In search of a method

| University of Bologna
| University of Bologna
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.
Keywords: constrained language, gravitational pull hypothesis, collocation, lexical association measures, bootstrapping
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Phraseological insights on learner language, translation and constrained language
    • 2.1Phraseology in learner language
    • 2.2Phraseology in translated language
    • 2.3The constrained language hypothesis
    • 2.4Learner translation corpora as a subset of learner corpora
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Research questions and overall research method
    • 3.2Description of the dataset
    • 3.3Quantitative and qualitative analysis
      • 3.3.1Definition, extraction and scoring of TL/L2 collocations
      • 3.3.2By-subject analysis of collocationality in translations and essays
      • 3.3.3Qualitative exploration of connectivity: Data from bilingual dictionaries
      • 3.3.4Exploration of SL effects: Equivalents from dictionaries, machine translation and source texts, with association scores from an SL corpus
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.22012.fer
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