LEXICAL COLLOCATION ERRORS IN LITERARY TRANSLATION

Abstract

This study aims to explore lexical collocation errors in Turkish-English translations of literary texts. To identify, describe and explain the errors (Ellis, 1985), a written corpus of Turkish literary texts and their English translation texts (ETT) was compiled from students of the Department of English Translation and Interpretation. Benson et al.’s (1997) classifications for lexical collocations have been used in order to analyse lexical collocation errors for this study. Also, the most common lexical collocation errors (verb+noun) were examined in terms of restriction on collocability and the L1 influence. The amounts of errors per lexical collocation type in the ETT indicate that the most common type is that of verb + noun, followed by adjective + noun. Moreover, in terms of EFL/ESL learners and translator education, this study suggests that more restrictions of collocation cause poorer collocation production, and L1 influence plays an important role in translators’ erroneous collocations. The findings of this study have a number of important implications for future practice of foreign/second language learning and translation education. It’s extremely important for foreign language learners to have English-Turkish and Turkish-English bilingual dictionaries of lexical collocations, as searching for the right collocation they spend a lot of time and energy. Also, authentic materials are essential to introduce collocations.