Transfer of Phraseological Units (Collocations) in Literary Translation. Corpus-based Research in the French Language and its Equivalents in Italian and Polish
Creators: name: Golda, Paweł
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: This doctoral thesis aims to examine the interlingual transfer of verbal-nominal collocations in literary translation by analysing in detail 6 578 examples. The corpus of the thesis consists of the first seven novels by the contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq published over a quarter of a century, namely between 1994 and 2019. The corpus includes the novels in their original language — French — and their translations into two other languages — Italian and Polish.

Collocations, a significant topic in contemporary phraseology, are placed near the beginning of the fixedness continuum, on the side of free lexical combinations (Sułkowska, 2017). Perko (2011) states that the boundary between collocations and more fixed phraseological units is as blurred as the boundary between collocations and free lexical combinations. Collocations are minimally phraseological, meaning they are preferred over free structures with similar meanings (Pęzik, 2018).

These multi-word combinations are a less stereotypical class of phraseological units, which makes their belonging to the field of phraseology less obvious. Legallois and Tutin (2013) note that linguistic research often focuses on non-transparent and figurative expressions, considered prototypical of phraseology, at the expense of highly productive collocations. Kazlauskienė (2021) defines collocation as the frequent co-occurrence of two lexemes, while Diagne (2018) describes it as a systematic bond forming between frequently co-occurring elements, reflecting linguistic idiosyncrasies specific to a language.

The thesis aims to identify and describe techniques for translating verbal-nominal collocations from French into Italian and Polish. Translation techniques here refer to the linguistic means by which phraseological units are transferred (Golda & Mężyk, 2021). The choice of languages was deliberate: Italian, a Romance language like French, and Polish, a Slavic language genetically more distant from the source language.

The thesis explores the regularity of translation solutions across different aspects and subtypes of collocations. It analyses the influence of syntactic structure, semantic classes, and translator preferences in using specific techniques. The thesis also examines the recurrence of collocations and compares the frequency of translation techniques of the collocations used once and multiple times.

The thesis comprises three main parts. The theoretical part reviews linguistic literature, presenting key concepts in phraseology and discussing translation, focusing phraseotranslation, a new sub-discipline of phraseology proposed by Sułkowska (2016).

The methodological part presents the trilingual literary corpus and the biography of Houellebecq. It details all the phases that enabled the extraction of the collocation combinations and their subsequent juxtaposition with their equivalents. The results are presented in a trilingual table, including all the research data, additional tags, and descriptions.

The analytical part has two chapters: the first describes fifteen techniques for transferring verbal-nominal collocations; the second discusses the frequency of each technique, considering various factors and unit categories. The thesis also includes an introduction, conclusion, bibliography, and an appendix with both physical and virtual material available online.