Strategies adopted by the novice translators in translation of collocations in literary texts

Collocations are fixed constructions. Unlike idioms, their meaning can be detected from their other collocates. Collocations play a pivotal role in languages as well as translation so they must be translated in an acceptable way. Since they convey a kind of sense that cannot be translated word- by- word, they must be translated into collocational forms to raise the same sense and aesthetic in the target language. The present paper aims to find out what strategies translators adopt for translating collocations. More specifically, the paper seeks to find out whether they render collocations into collocational forms or make them neutral. To do so, two English literary texts (one from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro and the other one from Idioms and Metaphorical Expressions in Translation by Ghaffar Tajalli) that contain collocations were given to two groups of ten undergraduate students majoring in translation studies from two different universities in Iran. The goal was to understand how they translate contextualized collocations into Persian. The study revealed that the students did not translate collocations into collocational forms. Based upon the results, it was concluded that the translators’ unfamiliarity with the collocations in both source and target languages caused them to choose word - by- word translation that resulted in neutral instead of collocational forms