The Use of Collocations as a Measure of Translation Quality and Translator Competence

A Master of Arts Thesis in English / Arabic / English Translation and Interpreting by Reham Zafer Bzour Entitled, "The Use of Collocations as a Measure of Translation Quality and Translator Competence," April 2006. Thesis Advisor is Dr. Basil Hatim. Available are both Soft and Hard Copies of the Thesis.

Abstract

In this thesis, the use of collocations as a measure of translation quality and of the translator's competence is studied. It is believed that collocations' competence contributes greatly to one's language competence and helps ably to communicate more naturally and fluently. The significance of using more acceptable and suitable TL (target language) collocations in the translation is examined through comparing two English /Arabic translations as samples from a collocational point of view. In the conclusion, the optimum translation is the one which uses more collocations that accurately reflect ST meanings and the remarkable character of the ST (elevated, rhetorical and expressive language). It is hoped that this will be adopted as a rigorous measure of translation Quality Assessment in general.