Analysing collocations in articles published in coworking blogs in Portuguese : a comparative study on authentic and translated texts

Abstract

This paper reports on a descriptive and comparative study that falls within corpus based translation studies (Baker, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2004). The goal was to identify and describe similarities and differences in the collocations used in articles published in coworking blogs written originally in Portuguese and in texts of the same genre written in English and translated into Portuguese. Tagnin’s (2013) taxonomy was used to inform our view of collocation. We assume that translated texts may use word combinations that do not sound natural in the target language because they are atypical in texts written originally in this language, following Mauranen’s (2007) findings. Also, this paper’s first author has worked with specialized translation for over a decade and observed that, in this context, there is a generalized expectation for texts to sound natural. We therefore argue that translators should be aware and have a good knowledge of collocations. The articles were collected from websites maintained by coworking companies, processed and analysed following corpus linguistics principles, a methodology that allows the identification of linguistic patterns. Two corpora were used: 1) a parallel corpus, with texts written originally in English and their corresponding translations into Portuguese and 2) a monolingual corpus with texts originally written in Portuguese. The corpora were stored in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014), and the collocations were identified from n-gram lists from both corpora in Portuguese. The analyses found collocations that were frequently used in both corpora, such as trabalho flexível and espaço de trabalho, which describe professional environments and ways of working. As expected, differences were also found. One example is escritório privativo, which appears only in the translated corpus. In the authentic corpus, this concept is expressed as sala privativa. Thus, this article may be used to raise awareness, among translation students, professional translators, and professors, of the importance of looking for conventional word combinations in the target language while translating texts.