Collocations with a word certificate /

pažymėjimas and their translation

 Content

• Aims and goals

• Theoretical background

• Methodology

• Analysis

• Conclusion

• References
 Aims and goals
Aim – analyse the structure of selected collocations and their translation with the
word certificate / pažymėjimas from an EU document.

Goals:

1. describe the concept, structure and translation of collocations based on

theoretical sources;

2. extract collocations with the word certificate from an EU document in

Lithuanian and English and analyse their structure using an automated
program;

3. to identify the characteristics of the translation of collocations with the word

certificate into Lithuanian;

4. assess the strength of the translated collocations.

 Theoretical background
• Collocations are usually made up of very frequently used words. In this way,
speakers get used to words being used together, no matter which part of the
language they belong to or what they mean.

• According to Nizonkiza and Van de Poel (2014), grammatical collocations

consist of a base word, such as a verb, adjective or noun, accompanied by an
adverb or grammatical construction Lexical collocations have also been
discussed. In the work of these authors, 7 types of lexical collocation
structure were identified: verb + noun; noun + verb; noun + noun; verb +
adjective; adjective + noun; verb + adverb; verb + expression. In the case of
this study, most collocations had noun + noun structure.
 Theoretical background
According to Horbačauskienė and Petronienė (2012), in order to translate
collocations accurately, the translator should take into account the following main
characteristics of collocations:

1. simplicity (i.e. the meaning of the collocation is not straightforward).

Collocations are not fully compound because of the additional meaning
attached to the compound;

2. irreplaceability (the components of a collocation cannot be replaced by other

words, even if they mean the same thing in context);

3. non-modifiability (as a rule, collocations cannot be freely modified by

additional lexical meaning or grammatical transformations).
 Theoretical background
As far as the translation of EU documents is concerned, the article by Zaikauskas
(2014) deals with ways of translating terms from EU documents into Lithuanian.
According to him, most English terms are translated using literal translation
method.

International terms and their translation strategies are also an important point to
consider, as in the analysis it was collected collocations specifically from the EU
document.
 Methodology
• The method of the project is to extract collocations from an EU document
using a text linguistics approach and AntConc automatic program. For their
analysis, comparative and descriptive methods are applied.

• Comparative method was used to compare collocations in Lithuanian and

English. Descriptive method was used to assess the situation in relation to the
attributes of interest.
 Analysis
• Collocations were collected from the same document in Lithuanian and
English. The document was taken from the Eur-Lex page. The automatic
program AntConc was used to collect the collocations. This program is an
advanced text analysis program that provides detailed information about the
text of one or more text files.

• The collocation tool was used for this project. This tool allows you to search
for cognates of a term.

• A total of 22 collocations were selected. The collocations selected are those

with the first, second, third and, in some cases, fourth collocate on the left
and right. Then their structure, translation and collocation‘s strength were
analysed.
 Analysis
More collocates with the word certificate / pažymėjimas were found in Lithuanian than in
English when using the program. English does not have the same variety of word endings as
Lithuanian. Lithuanian has a variety of different verbs, so the search for collocations in
Lithuanian did not include the full word, but only part of it. As a result, the results in
Lithuanian are correspondingly higher.

Collocations were selected for the analysis because parts of speech such as prepositions,
conjunctions, articles. These parts of speech were excluded because they do not reveal the
meaning of the text and are therefore not relevant for this study. The manually selected
collocations were listed in a separate table.

KAUNO T ECHNO L O G IJ O S UNI VERSI T ETA S

 Conclusion
1. Theoretical sources offer a variety of conceptions of collocations, and there is no single agreed
definition. Translating collocations can be a very difficult task in order to convey the original
thought in the translated text.

2. In both Lithuanian and English, collocations were mainly structured with nouns. According to
the authors, this structure of collocations is one of the most common.

3. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that literal translation is the most commonly used
translation method. The second most common translation method is translation by a more
general word, followed by transposition. Addition was the least used.

4. After reviewing the strength of collocations in AntConc it can be concluded that collocations
translated into Lithuanian remain strong and are frequently used in the text.

KAUNAS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

 References

1. Horbačauskienė, J., & Petronienė, S. (2012). Translation Transformations of Lexical

Collocations. Studies about languages, 20, 79-84. Retrieved from:
https://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/objects/LT-LDB-0001
:J.04~2012~1367184411234/datastreams/DS.002.1.01.ARTIC/content
2. Nizonkiza, D., & Van de Poel, K. (2014). Teachability of collocations: The role of word
frequency counts. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 32(3),
301–316. Retrieved from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278325318_Teachability_of_collocations_The_
role_of_word_frequency_counts
3. Zaikauskas, E. (2014). Terminų vertimo būdai Europos Sąjungos teisės aktų vertimuose į
lietuvių kalbą. Terminologija, 21, 71-89. Retrieved from:
https://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/fedora/objects/LT-LDB-0001:J.04~2016~149044191853
3/datastreams/DS.002.0.01.ARTIC/content