Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

290defended by Atkins and Rundell (2008: 468) according to which the semantic content of thelexical units as well as their collocational contexts are of paramount importance for theassignment of equivalents. For instance, commit 1 , engage 1 , incorrer 1 and praticar 1 weregrouped together into the same frame but whereas the last three verbs typically combinewith terms denoting the generic idea of crime, the first one does not. As a result, the termengage 1 can be translated by incorrer 1 as well as by praticar 1 , but commit 1 cannot betranslated by incorrer 1 or by praticar 1 in all contexts. Thus, frames proved to be anexcellent ―tertium comparationis‖ means (Piotrowski 1994) to assign equivalents as theyinclude information on the semantic content of the lexical units as well as theircollocational contexts.It is important to mention that our methodology did not account for zeroequivalents. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, our objective consisted in developing amethodology for assigning equivalents and discriminating them. Secondly, the number ofselected terms which we described corresponds to a small amount of the terms that can befound in the corpus texts. We cannot conclude that a verb does not have an equivalentbecause we did not describe all the terms of the corpus. Nonetheless, the methodology thatwe used allows us to explain why some cognate terms that we identified are not fullequivalents. For instance, invoke 1 ([Argumentation] frame) is not the equivalent of invocar 1([Contesting] frame) because they were grouped into different frames.As our methodology was not designed to account for zero equivalents and as weidentified 117 pairs of full equivalents, our findings do not indicate significant asymmetriesin the English and Portuguese terminologies. We remind the reader that legal discourse issaid to be culture-bound, this originating many mismatches between each national legalsystem. We can only formulate the hypothesis that verbs lend themselves less well to theobservation of such phenomena. Thus, as far as the (un)translatability debate is concerned(cf. Chapter 2, section 2.1.1.3.), we argue that, at least, specialized verbs that occur in