The effect of standardisation on collocations in Colombian and European Spanish translations of the work "Rootless"

Abstract

The empirical study of syntactic, stylistic, and lexical patterns through corpora has frequently revealed a tendency towards standardisation, as Toury (1995/2012) defines it, in translated texts. In this vein, some studies have found that diatopy tends to become blurred in translations, particularly into transnational languages. In the case of Spanish, it has been stated that the enormous geographical richness of the language is not really reflected in translated Spanish. This paper argues that the translation of the work Rootless by Chris Howard into Colombian Spanish exhibits traits more typical of the European Spanish than of the Colombian Spanish variety. For this purpose, diatopic distribution of verb + noun (object) collocations extracted from a parallel corpus and a monolingual corpus of Rootless and its translations published in Colombian and European Spanish, is examined in a reference Spanish corpus.
 Keywords: parallel corpus; translated Spanish; Colombian Spanish; standardisation in translation; diatopic variation