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Translation-specific lexicogrammar?
Characteristic lexical and collocational patterning
in Swedish texts translated from English
Per-Ola Nilsson
Göteborg University
This paper reports on an investigation of the Swedish grammatical word av
(‘of’, ‘by’), which is overrepresented in Swedish fiction translations from
English in relation to Swedish non-translated fiction texts in the comparable
part of The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC).Thestudyalso
incorporated the most significantly overrepresented collocational patterns
involving av. Through the investigation it became clear that the
overrepresentation of av is general and significant, and that there is also
significant overrepresentation of associated patterns involving lexical as well
as grammatical words. The study further indicated that the patterns are
mainlyduetosourcelanguagetransfer.
1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to investigate translation-specific collocational
patterning in Swedish fiction texts translated from English. 1 In the investigation,
which is corpus-driven, the translation-specific distribution of the
Swedish grammatical word av (‘of’, ‘by’) is described, along with the usage
of constructions where the word is frequently found. English-Swedish crosslinguistic
description is also made, in order to trace possible source items
and constructions contributing to the specific distribution in the Swedish
translated texts.
Collocation concerns the syntactic features of lexis in the sense that different
lexical items have a smaller or greater likelihood of occurring together, as
collocates (cf. Malmkjaer & Anderson 1991:301). A collocation has been defined
as “a sequence of words that occurs more than once in identical form
(. . .) and which is grammatically well-structured” (Kjellmer 1987, quoted in