An exploration of translated collocations in the Constitution of South Africa: a corpus-based study

Abstract

Collocations, or words that occur in proximity to one another, are a linguistic phenomenon that appears in all human languages. Their translation tends to pose a considerable problem for translators because equivalence in meaning is difficult to achieve. This article explores how the collocations in the English version of the Constitution of South Africa have been translated into three Nguni languages, namely Zulu, Swati and Ndebele. Since these languages are closely related, this investigation demonstrates the degree to which lexical collocations are translated differently and whether the translators used the same strategies. ParaConc is used to extract data from the different versions of the Constitution of South Africa. The analysis is qualitative in nature, using descriptive and comparative approaches. By comparing the different collocations in the translations, we establish the way in which the collocations have been translated and also whether the source text message has been conveyed accurately.