The role of equivalence in the translation of collocations

Equivalence is an expression from a language which has the same meaning as, or can be used in a similar context to, one from another language, and can therefore be used to translate it: for example, English I don't understand, French Je ne comprehends pas, Italian Non capisco, Modern Greek Dhen katalaveno, Japanese Wakarimasen

Collocations are the words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. “Why do builders not produce a building or authors not invent a novel, since they do invent stories and plots? No reason as far as dictionary definitions of words are concerned. We don’t say it because we don’t say it.” (Bolinger and Sears, 1968: 55) True equivalents of collocations are paramount to make up correct sentences and to be understood by native speakers easily. For example, the English say 'get married to someone'. In Uzbek we use 'with' after 'marry' (which seems more logical for us). However, this isn't the normal way in English. So, firstly the equivalent of the whole phrase ('get married to someone'), must be learnt, then no one makes this mistake. Every language has thousands of collocations and it is almost impossible to learn all of them. In this article there are given the linguists’ views on equivalents of collocations and some advice which can help language learners to become more aware of the collocational words. In addition, the most common collocations are given with translation examples in it.

Translation is a process which is complex and multifaceted. It is common to talk about "translating from one language to another", but in fact the process of translation is not only about replacing one language with another. Translating was seen as a decision-making process, where a translator often has different kinds of possibilities to choose in order to fulfil the function of the translation. If a particular language unit in one language carries the same intended meaning/message encoded in a particular language environment in another, then the two units are considered equivalent. The area of equivalents covers linguistic units such as morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, idioms and proverbs. So, the search for equivalents is the most problematic stage of translation. It should be noted, however, that this does not mean that the translator must always find one-to-one categorically or structurally equivalent units in two languages, that is, sometimes two different language units in different languages have the same function.

Some definitions of translation actually replace equivalence with identification and emphasize the need to fully preserve the content of the original in the translation. For example, when Fedorov uses the term "utility" instead of "equivalence", this utility implies "a complete transfer of the semantic content of the original." However, this thesis has not found its confirmation in the observed evidence, and its supporters are forced to make many remarks that contradict the original definition. Thus, L.S. Barkhudarov's invariance “can be said only in a relative sense”, “translation losses are inevitable; there is an incomplete transmission of the meanings expressed in the original text. but it remains unclear how this should be combined with the fact that "the immutability of the content plan" is expressed as a single determinant.

A set of English verbs that are extremely common, such as do, make, get, have, go, etc. often cause learners problems with collocation. Some learners often say get a baby/an accident/fun instead of have a baby/an accident/fun, and make some shopping/research/work, instead of do some shopping/research/work. While the native English speakers intuitively make the correct collocation, based on a life-time experience of hearing and reading the words in fixed combinations, the Uzbek learners of English try to translate the words. The problem for the Uzbek learners of English is that there are no collocation rules that can be learned. They have more limited experience and may frequently collocate words in a way that sounds odd to the native speaker. Uzbek students’ collocation errors are mainly because of lack of knowledge about collocations.

There is a table of most common English adjective noun collocations with Uzbek equivalents:

As it is clear from the table the word “heavy” has different equivalents if we translate it into Uzbek. In the initial combinations its equivalent can be translated as “og’ir” it is the most acceptable translation. However, when the word “heavy” comes together with the words “rain”, “snow” we cannot translate it as we did in the first examples. It is not clear enough if we translate it as the following: “og’ir yomg’ir” or “og’ir qor” this does not make sense. Here the word “kuchli” can be more accepted equivalent. In the last example the given adjective can be translated as “katta” and it makes sense.

There is a table of most common English verb collocations with Uzbek equivalents:

As it is clear according to the table one word “do” can be translated and used in different equivalents in Uzbek language “qilmoq”, “yuvmoq”, “bajarmoq”, “zarar keltirmoq”. As a result, such phrases are often made by Uzbek students of English, even by the intermediate learners, as * do a decision, *do a party and *do an experiment. The correct expressions should be make a decision, have a party and do an experiment. They make such mistakes because the English words make, have and do have the same equivalent “qilmoq” make a decision- qaror qilmoq, bazm qilmoq, tajriba o’tkazmoq in Uzbek. In the same way, the Influenced by the way Uzbek students use a general term to express many different meanings they transfer this habit into making wrong English collocations. From what has been mentioned above, it is clear that figuring out the equivalents of collocation is a big problem in learners’

In conclusion, achieving true equivalence in translation has many advantages as it is discussed above. When a word or phrase means exactly the same thing in both languages, we call that an equivalence, and it's understandably one of the first things professional translators look for. Comparative studies of languages show that the translations of the words may not always be suitable when it is done by a computer. In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, the equivalence problem is the question of determining, given two representations of formal languages, whether they denote the same formal language. It is also stated in the article that loss of meaning often happens because of being unaware of collocations and not achieving true equivalents in both source and target language. So the translators should consider the varieties of collocations and the relationships between words and this requires a deep understanding of the colloquial expressions of both first and second languages, not just the words.

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