Collocational constructions in translated spanish: What corpora reveal

Abstract

In recent years, Construction Grammar has emerged as an enhanced theoretical framework for studies on phraseology in general, and particularly for collocational analysis. This paper aims at contributing to the study of collocational constructions in translated Spanish. To this end, the construction [V PP_de miedo] is analysed in detail. Our methodology is corpus-based and compares subtitled translations with general Spanish, American Spanish and Peninsular Spanish. The findings suggest that collocational constructions in translated Spanish have a clear preference for the Peninsular standard. They reflect features of translationese, as well as universal traits such as simplification, normalisation, and convergence. Another interesting finding refers to corpus selection, as giga-token corpora appear to provide more fine-grained analysis that conventional, balanced corpora.