Phraseological Approach

In translation of texts, especially scientific texts, phraseological approach can be employed to produce documents (translated texts) with appropriate collocations and idioms. To understand what phraseological approach is, we need to understand phraseology.

Phraseology is the study of the structure, meaning and use of word combinations (Cowie, 1994; Ebeling & Hasselgård, 2015).

As a concept, phraseology is often used to describe the tendency of words and groups of words to occur more frequently in specific environments than in others (Hunston, 2011).

In phraseology, the smallest linguistic element is called ‘phraseological unit’. Phraseological units refer to lexical combinations, the meaning of which is defined by the whole expression (Subbotina, 2013). In a simpler definition, phraseological units are word combination whose meaning is defined according to the whole expression, not the language components.

Phraseological units carry emotional expressiveness (emotion) and conciseness of thought expression (thoughts). The units comprise non-figurative phraseological units commonly known as ‘collocations’ and figurative phraseological units called as ‘idioms’.

When using phraseological approach, translators focus on transferring collocations and idioms from the source language to the target language.