TRANSLATING FORMULAIC EXPRESSIONS IN INSTRUCTION MANUALS: A CORPUS STUDY

Formulaic expressions, understood here as a broader concept than the traditional idiom, have been scarcely researched as a class, particularly with regard to their occurrence in technical domains. Despite claims that technical writing tends to be neutral and impersonal, avoiding emotiveness, which implies a lack of such expressions (cf. Britton 1974, Pinchuck 1977, Cabré 1999), in this study we show that formulaic expressions do appear in texts belonging to technical domains and we focus on a previously translated corpus of English-Spanish instruction manuals to analyse in depth the incidence of such expressions. The aim is to draw conclusions from our findings in technical domains that might shed some light on the phenomenon of formulaicity in general. 1