Phraseology and Translation : from theoretical hypotheses to practical tools

In spite of the success of phraseology across a range of linguistic disciplines such as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis or semantics, it may come as a surprise that the notion is hardly mentioned in Translation Studies. Delisle (2003), for instance, treats set phrases as part of the lexicon. They are also most conspicuously absent from a major reference work in the field, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker and Saldanha 2011). The same holds true of collocations. As a matter of fact, the interest for phraseology in translation studies came mainly from the European Society for Phraseology (Europhras) and from corpus linguistics (e.g. Teubert 2002). Computational linguistics, in its turn, is showing a growing interest for matters involving translation and collocations in the broad sense. It is now generally recognised that phraseology poses a serious problem to machine translation (MT), because it involves a higher semantic level that cannot be grasped by processing the individual words. Multi-word units (including also lexical bundles, Biber et al. 2004) have indeed been called a pain in the neck for NLP (Sag et al. 2001). Recent findings from studies devoted to the performance of MT with regard to phraseology (Monti, Mitkov, Corpas Pastor and Seretan, eds. 2013) suggest that traditional, syntactically based systems obtain lower scores than statistically based systems such as Google Translate. However, Google Translate yields erroneous results for phraseology in at least 40 percent of the cases, which may easily be confirmed by typing randomly chosen collocations in context, especially if they are partly fixed or if the set phrases are less common. There are also many problems posed by phraseology to human translation. Decoding phraseology in the source text is far from easy for translators and interpreters, all the more so as they are usually not native speakers of the source language. Also, finding a natural formulation in the target language and avoiding translationese requires an excellent mastery of the phraseology of the target language. I will argue that experiments with translation corpora may precisely shed some light on some crucial notions of phraseology and of translation studies. Experiments have shown that translation errors due to phraseology are legion in many translation corpora, even in the official translations of the European Union. A contribution of corpus-based phraseology would therefore consist in making human translators aware of the pitfalls of phraseology in the source text. Even experienced professionals sometimes fail to detect the fixed or semi-fixed character of a source text construction. Experiments along these lines should therefore also include the creation of large, multilingual phraseological databases, which brings us back to two serious shortcomings of computational phraseology: 1. There is no universally accepted algorithm for the automatic extraction of phraseology, especially not for ngrams larger than bigrams. 2. There is no consensus as to the proportion of set phrases in relation with the rest of the vocabulary: according to Jackendoff (1995), there are about as many fixed expressions as there are single words in the dictionary, but others (such as Mel'čuk 1995) hold the view that fixed expressions far outnumber single words. I will argue in that respect that algorithms derived from text mining and information retrieval techniques (Baeza-Yates, R. & B. Ribeiro-Neto 1999) can be efficient and (computationally) cost-effective in order to build up unfiltered collections of recurrent fixed or semi-fixed phrases, from which translators could gain information about the number of set phrases in the source text. Such an algorithm has been proposed in Colson (2015), and a provisional database of about 700,000 English set phrases (tokens) has been assembled, which seems to confirm that Jackendoff's view about the total number of fixed expressions was not correct. References Baeza-Yates, R. & B. Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information Retrieval. New York: ACM Press, Addison Wesley. Baker, M. & G. Saldanha (eds.) (2011). Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. New York: Routledge. Biber, D., Conrad, S. & V. Cortes (2004). “If you look at… Lexical Bundles in University Teaching and Textbooks.” Applied Linguistics 25(3): 371-405. Colson, J.-P. (2007). The World Wide Web as a corpus for set phrases. In: H. Burger, D. Dobrovol’skij, P. Kühn & N. R. Norrick (eds.), Phraseologie / Phraseology. Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Volume 2. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, p. 1071-1077. Colson, J.-P. (2008). Cross-linguistic phraseological studies: An overview. In: Granger, S. & F. Meunier (eds.), Phraseology. An interdisciplinary perspective. John Benjamins, Amsterdam / Philadelphia, p. 191-206. Colson J.-P. (2010a). The Contribution of Web-based Corpus Linguistics to a Global Theory of Phraseology. In: Ptashnyk, S., Hallsteindóttir, E. & N. Bubenhofer (eds.), Corpora, Web and Databases. Computer-Based Methods in Modern Phraselogy and Lexicography. Hohengehren, Schneider Verlag, p. 23-35. Colson, J.-P. (2010b). Automatic extraction of collocations: a new Web-based method. In: S. Bolasco, S., Chiari, I. & L. Giuliano, Proceedings of JADT 2010, Statistical Analysis of Textual Data, Sapienza University of Rome, 9-11 June 2010. Milan, LED Edizioni, p. 397-408. Colson, J.-P. (2012). A new statistical classification of set phrases. In : Pamies, A., Pazos Bretaña, J.M. & L. Luque Nadal (eds.), Phraseology and Discourse : Cross Linguistic and Corpus-based Approaches. Phraseologie und Parömiologie, Band 29. Hohengehren, Schneider Verlag, p. 377-385. Colson, J.-P. (2015, in press). Set phrases around globalization : an experiment in corpus-based computational phraseology. In: A. Almeida, F.-I. Ortega Barrera, E. Quintana Toledo & M.E. Sánchez Cuervo (eds). Input a Word, Analyze the World: Selected Approaches to Corpus Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Delisle, J. (2003). La traduction raisonnée. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa. Firth, J. R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930–1955. In F. Palmer (Ed.), Selected Papers of J. R. Firth 1952–1959. London: Longman, p. 168–205. Gries, S. (2013). 50-something years of work on collocations. 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