While a translator is translating, often several translation options are cognitively activated to express a certain idea that is encoded in the source text. These options can be lexical, pragmatic, and grammatical in nature, and are referred to in lexical variation studies as onomasiological choices. During the last decades, numerous studies within corpus-based translation studies have shown that lexical and grammatical onomasiological choices made by translators deviate – at least to some extent – from the choices made by writers of original, non-translated texts (for an overview, see Kruger and Van Rooy [2012]). However, the adopted onomasiological perspective in corpus-based translation studies is mostly limited to a binary choice (i.e., the choice between two possible translation outcomes). Ongoing research on explicitation in translation that investigates how the translator chooses between an explicit variant and an implicit one is illustrative of this (e.g., Olohan and Baker [2000] and Olohan [2003] on optional that and Van Beveren, De Sutter, and Colleman [2018] on optional om in Dutch infinitival clauses). In this article, we want to broaden the onomasiological scope by studying multiple competing translation outcomes. Indeed, there are often more than two ways of referring to a certain concept, and by not taking into account this more complex lexical-onomasiological situation, corpus-based translation studies misses opportunities to gain better, more accurate insight into what drives translation behaviour. In this study, we aim to include multiple (prototypical) near-synonymous verbs in Dutch that can be used to express inchoativity (viz. beginnen ‘to begin’, starten ‘to start’, opstarten ‘to start up’, and van start gaan ‘to launch’). More particularly, we investigate what the underlying motivations are to opt for one verbal lexeme over the others, and to what extent these motivations differ in translated texts compared to non-translated texts. The reason to focus on verbal inchoativity in Dutch is purely instrumental: it allows us to investigate the patterning of multiple onomasiological options as a function of the text status (translated vs. non-translated) and as a function of different underlying motivations (see Section 2). Most languages, including Dutch, have a large set of words and constructions to express inchoativity, which in general signals a change of state, or the onset of a new situation, and often implies a transition from non-action to action (Shi 1990; Piñón 2001; Divjak and Gries 2009; Marín and McNally 2011; Verroens 2011). For our study, we used a parallel corpus of English–Dutch translations and a comparable corpus of authentic Dutch texts, which are part of the ten-million-word bidirectional Dutch Parallel Corpus (Macken, De Clercq, and Paulussen 2011).

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