ABSTRACT
Translation has been with human interaction from the time of creation. Scholars have found it necessary to set up frameworks for the regulation of translation due to variation and the peculiarities of languages. The study examines and analyzes the problems that may be encountered in the process of translating collocations. The source text is a legal document.
Chapter one looks at the history of translation and the process of organization of translation as a field of study. The implications of translation on globalization and integration of nations was also examined. Due to the increased trend of integration and need for communication among peoples of different languages, the issue of collocations and their nature were examined. Previous studies on collocations: definitions, characteristics and relevance to translation were also assessed. Chapter Two is the translation of the text “Guide juridique et fiscal des associations au
Togo” Tome II. A brief introduction of the source text was done. A translation of the text which is a legal document – administrative and tax manual was done.
Chapter Three analyzes and discusses the problems encountered in the translation of collocations, from the source text into the target language and solutions. Conclusions made from the study are also in this chapter. It was realized that collocations take a significant chunk of most texts. They are therefore relevant to the study of translation and to the mastery of language.
Collocations were not found in the text were not necessarily monosemous. Collocations in technical text may be ambiguous and polysemous. Functional equivalence has implications in the translation of collocations in technical text. It was also realized that one needs to know the collocational ranges of lexical items, to enable make appropriate choices for a faithful translation.
Keywords: Analytical study, collocations, concordance, collocational range, legal text
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. i
DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………………….. iii
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………………………………………………. v
CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1
1.0
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
1
- The Statement of the Problem………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
CHAPTER TWO………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 22
2.1 Source Text……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 22
Translation of the Source Text into English……………………………………………………………. 24
CHAPTER THREE………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 95
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS GLOSSARY
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
- Background to the Study
According to Sonia Firdaus (2012, p.277) in her article “Evolution of Translation Theories & Practice”, the process of translation started when the first human couple interacted with each other. She further asserts that, “translation became an organized discipline when the first translator, a French Humanist Etienne Dolet, formed rules for rendering of meaning of a text into another language. From then, various paradigms have provided the base for modern complicated investigation.”
From the above stated, it is obvious that translation has been practised in human interaction for ages and may continue to be relevant to human activity until the end of time. It is therefore necessary for one to understand what translation is, as well as understand the linguistic tools that may impact positively on translation.
In Larson’s opinion,
“Translation is that which consists of studying the lexicon, grammatical structure, communication situation, and cultural context of the source language text, analyzing it in order to determine its meaning, and then reconstructing this same meaning using the lexicon and grammatical structure which are appropriate in the RECEPTOR LANGUAGE and its cultural context” (Larson, 1984 p.3)
For Seleskovitch and Lederer,
To translate is to “Restituer le sens dans une autre langue, c’est le rendre intelligible sur deux plans, c’est le faire comprendre sans rendre brumeaux ce qui était clair ni ridicule
ce qui était digne” (Restoring meaning in another language is to render it intelligible at two levels: to make it comprehensible without rendering obscure that which is clear, nor ridiculous that which is worthy (translation rendered by Ajunwa). Seleskovitch and Lederer (1986, p.62) cited in Ajunwa (2015).
According to Newmark (1988, p.5) in his book “A Textbook of Translation”, translation “may mean the rendering of meaning of a text into another language in the same way that the author intended in the text”.
Wright and Budin (1996, p. 16-17), posit that, though various writers in the field of linguistics call many different kinds of multiword strings collocations, purists argue that this term should be reserved for so-called combinatory phraseological units. Wright and Budin (1996) further state that combinatory forms are made up of words that frequently co-occur (i.e. “co- locate”), even if they don’t always follow each other directly in sentences. They insist that the principle of potential dislocation within the stream of discourse constitutes the essential property of combinatory forms, hence of co-location. They also make a distinction between the concepts “term” and “collocation”. They assert that “tems designate individual concepts … whereas technical collocations identify situations or propositions that are for the most part made up of several mutually related concepts”.
Budin and Wright’s designation of collocation, makes collocation relevant as a tool for the rich development of translation since “the purpose of the element of collocation “ is to firmly delineate the conceptual and linguistic space occupied by strictly defined closely associated concepts and units of knowledge”.
Murici (2016) in her article, “Issues in translating legal texts” asserts that we live in a world which is globalized and where international relations are much more active than ever. As a result,
close contacts among states, societies, people and businesses through mediation of translation has become crucial and is playing a very important role in human relations. We know that human interaction is ordered by law; therefore any transaction should consider legal implications. It is therefore necessary to examine collocations and their impact on translating legal texts, such as the source text being used for this study. The examination of collocations may ultimately minimize litigation over translated texts.
It is worth noting that regional integration and globalization towards achieving development goals have given rise to the need for harmonization of policies and programs internationally. As a result, the need for faithful translation to foster wider communication and greater understanding has increased. Collocations are described as monosemous in certain literature and so will be useful in the translation of legal and technical documents. It will therefore require collocational competence to enhance the benefits of translation in a global world, since according to Murici (2016), translating legal text has become important among other domains of translation and she also notes that, there is no room for error in translation as legal consequences may result. Translating legal texts, she posits, involves complex matters and specialized terminology.
The position of Ajunwa (2015) in his article “Fidelity Challenges in Translation” is worth considering by translators. He notes that though the idea of absolute exactitude may be utopian and unattainable, it is always desirable to achieve a reasonable and an acceptable level of fidelity in any translation operation whatsoever, be it … scientific and technical translation. He explains that the fidelity of a translation to its original text means the quality of its accuracy or the degree of its closeness to the original text. He further asserts that achieving this feat poses significant challenges to the translator.
From all that has been stated above, it is necessary for us to look at collocations and their relevance to translation. Larson (1984, p.155) states that collocation is concerned with how words go together. She further states that people speaking a language which is not their mother tongue often make collocational errors. These errors may be either grammatical or lexical, but either case, words are put together which do not naturally go together. Sometimes verbs and nouns are confused (p.160). This means that in translating a noun from French to English, one might have to change a noun to a verb as seen in the translation of the noun “creation d’une association” in French into the verb “form an association” because the translation of “creation d’une association” into English is preceded by the phrase “proceed to”.
Mckeown & Dragomir (2000) in their handbook on a website also assert that collocations are often language-specific and cannot be translated compositionally in most cases. This raises the problem of how salient word combinations that not only denote the legal field, but also convey conventional ways of expressing a state of affairs or an action as propounded by Gloria Corpas Pastor (January, 2015) can be accurately translated from a source language into a target language. For instance, in the source text is the word combination “Formalité obligatoire”, which cannot be translated as “obligatory formality”, nor “requisite procedure”, but can be translated as “mandatory procedure”.
The above reasons inform our choice of the text which is within the scope of technical and legal translation for this study.
Statement of the Problem
Larson (1984, p. 156) asserts that there are certain words in any language which are “fixed combinations”. They always occur in a certain order and they always occur together. She says other languages will have completely different combinations with fixed expressions.
In such fixed collocations, she notes that it is sometimes difficult to identify the meaning of the parts of the collocation.
Newmark (1988, p.28) notes that a translator needs analyze a text from a translator’s point of view, which is different from a linguist’s or literary critic’s.
The question then is will translation of collocations from a technical document not pose challenges because of collocational clashes? Collocational clashes are defined by Larson (1984, p.160) as collocational errors (grammatical or lexical errors) made by people speaking a language that is not their mother tongue. In other words, words are put together which do not naturally go together.
Research Objectives and Purpose of the Study
The general objective of the study is to examine the collocational patterns and the problems encountered in translating collocations from French into English using an extract from“Guide juridique et fiscal des Associations au Togo” Tome II as corpus.
The study seeks to assess and compare the collocations in the source and target texts; To identify types of collocations in the chosen text;
To identify the problems associated with translating collocations; and
To assess the concordance between collocates in the source and target text.
Theoretical Framework
The term collocation is used widely and differently. Firth first brought the idea of collocations into prominence. According to Firth (1957) “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” He defines collocations as actual words in habitual company. In this study, two theories will be used to analyze collocations. These theories are the ‘frequency based approach” derived from (Nesselhauf, 2004) which describes collocations as “the co-occurrence of words of a certain
distance”; and the “Significance oriented approach” (Herbst, 1996) where collocation is considered as a type of word combination, most commonly as one that is fixed to some degree, as quoted in the article of Xiujuan Zhou, A Corpus-Based Study on High Frequency Verb Collocations in the Case of “Have” published in International Forum of Teaching and Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 2016. These collocations are considered as “a composite unit which permits the sustainability of items for at least one of its constituent elements with the other elements being constant.
The theories to be tested are concordance as defined by Larson (1984) as “consistent matching of lexical items”. The procedures equivalence, transposition and modulation will also be tested.
Hypothesis
The French and English languages have reached a comparable degree of development, and collocations are language-specific, so texts can be easily and accurately translated from French into English.
The French and English languages have reached a comparable degree of development, and collocations are language specific, so texts cannot be easily and accurately translated from French into English.
Limitations of the Study
It is noteworthy that this translation project is a requirement for the award of a Master of Arts Degree in Translation. Time and resource constraints do not permit a much more detailed work. The scope of the work is therefore limited to a specific text.The study was limited to study of (1) dominant word (noun, adjective, participle, and verb) and a preposition or a grammatical
construction collocations and (2) “verb + Noun, adjective + noun, noun + verb, noun + noun, adverb + adjective, and adverb + adjective lexical collocations.
The focus of the study was on special collocations identified in the source text and how they were rendered in the target text. The study was limited to the extract of 8,439, words from the legal document as the Graduate School recommends the use of a total range of words between 8000 and 8500 words for the study. This limits the length of text to be used, and which may impact on the results.
This study is a case study and limits itself to the source document Guide Juridique et Fiscal Des Associations Au Togo, the target text and documents that may be available for triangulation. This is to enable the researcher identify the distinction between meaning and form, those things in language over which the speaker can exercise choice and over which no choice is available to him as stated by (Grimes 1975: 114) cited in Larson (1984).
Literature Review
This study is on the problems encountered in the translation of collocations from a legal text and their implications for translation. A legal and tax guide for associations in Togo has been selected for the study due to its peculiar characteristic of a manual drawn up for the use of associations both nongovernmental and civil. Of significance is the fact that, the manual was created over two decades ago. This enables the researcher assess to what extent neologisms affect collocations and as a result how collocational competence can be relevant over a reasonable period of time. The sustenance of collocations is important for translation because of the issue of fidelity in translation. This gives reason for examining the problems that might arise in translating collocations.
