How Trainee Translators Analyse Lexico-Grammatical Patterns

Abstract

In this study, we examine the ability of advanced students of specialised translation to identify and analyse 'generic collocations' in a corpus of specialised multilingual texts (mostly technical or scientific texts in English, French and German). In general, we find that our students attach much importance to frequently-occurring 'clusters' or 'n-grams'. However the students find it difficult to see these fragments as productive patterns of wording, or to assign a rhetorical function to them. This rather fixed view of phraseology suggests that there may be shortcomings in the way that we as teachers conceptualise and problematise the concept of the 'lexicogrammatical pattern' for our students. In the second part of this study, we suggest a different way of identifying and conceptualising phraseological phenomena using the metalanguage of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG).

What can linguistic approaches bring to English for Specific Purposes?

“…The following examples were first identified as part of a Master's level exercise in corpus linguistics (as reported in Gledhill & Kübler 2015). As part of their training in corpus linguistics, we ask our students to analyse five 'generic collocations', that is to say a selection of five lexico-grammatical patterns used in a corpus of French or English specialised texts.…”