This essay deals with translation changes and problems that occur when translating collocations, i.e. sequences of words that are usually combined such as work hard, from Swedish to German. Being an essential part of our communication, collocations are common both in everyday-life and in technical terminology. This qualitative research deals with collocations in scientific texts about children’s literature and aims to increase attention on collocations in the translation process. The term collocation as used here refers to the concept of hierarchical relations between the lexemes of a collocation by the German linguist F. J. Hausmann (1984), distinguishing between bases and collocators. It proved itself useful in the translation process and showed that the translator must pay special attention to the collocator in order to find the equivalent expression in the target language. In doing so he/she is not at all obliged to translate a collocation with the respective target collocation. In fact due to stylistic reasons collocations were replaced by individual lexemes or paraphrases. Referring to Hausmann’s terminology and the studies of Baker (1992) this essay highlights the importance of considering collocations as translation units, i.e. not translating the lexemes of a collocation separately. Furthermore the assumption was disproved that translation errors, e.g. interferences and semantic deficits, are mainly caused when translating collocations to a foreign language. Even translators translating into their mother tongue have to examine collocations carefully to avoid errors that can result in doubts about the quality of the whole translation.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-37004 |
Date | January 2014 |
Creators | Weiland, Caroline |
Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) |
Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
Language | German |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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