Collocations play very important role in making expressions in any language. Thus those must be taught in a course of translation. 

Hello Mater,

 Just like their contributory role in second language acquisition, collocations have a great bearing on the accuracy and quality of translated works. As a consequence, the essentially of collocational competence and its impact on translation is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. in point of fact, misinterpretation of collocations at lexical ,grammatical and semantic levels can indubitably  create serious problems for translators. Therefore, the provision of a specific course on collocations in English can certainly enhance the collocational knowledge of the targeted translators. As such, The inter-connection between language competence and translation skills can affect translator’s perception of how language works . Such connectivity has highlighted the role of  language in  translation classroom so much so carefully -designed translation-based language learning activities on various language issues like collocations can help  future translators'  language skills and their sensitivity to linguistic  challenges encountered in real-life translation contexts.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

 As translation in general is not only a matter of formal linguistic equivalence between any two specific languages, the knowledge of collocations in the source language is more about the proper comprehension of the source text an the first step in the textual analysis that is a must for any good translation. In order to be able to derive the basic invariant of the source text you have to understand the structure of linguistic features that form the text both in a cohesion a and coherence point of view. As I see it, satisfactory mastery of collocations is necessary for any language student and should be a given with the translation studies candidate.

To my mind, cohesion and coherence are less related to collocation than to aspects such as the following:  text organization, discourse markers and other types of signposting, move patterns in texts, lexical chains, use of topic and supporting sentences, and  reference words and phrases. Of course a number of these areas do include collocations and fixed phrases, but collocations are not the main part of what needs to be learnt in relation to cohesion and coherence. 

Having said that, collocations permeate virtually all the text types that one would need to translate. If we see texts as being on a continuum from conventional to creative, the texts that are closer to the conventional end of the continuum are likely to contain more collocations than texts at the creative end. However, unless a writer is self-consciously avoiding standardized expressions and word combinations, set phrases and collocations will continue to play a role.

The challenge for the teacher is to pick out collocations which a student is likely to need to use a lot and to anticipate the problems that he/ she will have with these collocations. I have seen many well-meaning collocation lists for Spanish learners of English that contain collocations that the student can already produce perfectly. 

Another issue when translating is to recognize when the writer is being more "conventional" and falling back on standard collocations and when (s)he is trying to be more creative, perhaps by combining words with one type of semantic prosody, with words that have another in order to produce particular rhetorical effects, such as shocking people or signalling irony. For example, "he has committed a number of good acts", where the standard association of  commit with nouns like murder or suicide, immediately signals to the observant, proficient reader that the writer is not completely at one with the actions that have been performed. A good translator would have to be aware of this in order to find a translation that produces the same effect. For a Spanish translator, this would be easy on the face of it, as (s)he could translate literally with "ha cometido" in order to produce a similar  "prosodic clash". However, if (s)he is not aware of the effect that the writer is trying to create, (s)he may opt for a more usual verb collocation of "acto", such as "hacer" o "realizar", and the rhetorical effect would be lost in translation.

Learners could benefit from courses which raise issues related to the role of semantic prosody in collocation. Dominic Stewart's book "Semantic Prosody a Critical Evaluation", with its healthy doses of scepticism, would not be a bad place to start, along with works by Stubbs, Sinclair and Louw among others. Louw's work, particularly "Irony in the text or insincerity in the Writer. The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies " and "Contextual Prosodic Theory: bringing prosodies to life",provides a refreshing counter to Stewart's scepticism. I disagree with some of his arguments, but we need people like Bill Louw with their unflagging passion and enthusiasm to get things moving.

Thank you very much for all