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Article published In: Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 11:2 (2016) ► pp.306–328

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The translation of Arabic lexical collocations

Published online: 4 August 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.11.2.09izw
Collocation is the tendency of lexical items to habitually co-occur in their immediate environment and is a result of arbitrary attraction between words which tend to associate with each other. Lexical collocation is the association of content words. This article investigates the translation of Arabic lexical collocations into English and discusses the methods and challenges of dealing with Arabic collocations cross-linguistically. First, collocation types, patterns, structures and restrictions are outlined. Other issues such as semantic and syntactic features as well as register are touched upon. Arabic Corpora were used to detect and verify occurrences of collocations. The article then discusses strategies of translating Arabic lexical collocations into English.
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