Collocations and the translation of news: an English-Spanish electronic dictionary of multi-word combinations as a translation tool

摘要

Cross-linguistic research in English-Spanish phraseology has been limited to the comparison of idioms or metaphors in both languages, or the study of categories of set phrases around a given topic such as anger. In exploring the phenomenon of collocations - as a major category of multi-word combinations - in bilingual dictionaries, this paper focuses on the instrumentality of multi-word-combination dictionaries for the translation of news as a case in point. By conducting a case study examining the translation of collocations from the website of BBC News (in English) into the corresponding Spanish online site (i.e. BBC Mundo), this contribution draws attention not only to the mistranslations pervading this news service but also - and perhaps more importantly - to the current deficit in tools enabling professionals to translate word collocations accurately. The potential of English-Spanish multi-word dictionaries like the one presented as part of this paper is likewise considered. This study reveals that bilingual phraseological dictionaries such as the English-Spanish Phraseological Units Dictionary herein employed, along with corpus-based resources, can provide an invaluable help to the practising translator, as current dictionaries do not seem to cover a large variety of real-life collocations.