Nadika Kavoosi - Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch of Fars
Mohammad JafarJabbari - YasujUniversity, Yasuj, Iran

Despite being a comprehensively researched topic in language studies, the notion of collocation is a relatively new phenomenon from a linguistic perspective. The idea of collocation was first proposed by Firth and accordingly detailed by Halliday and other linguists. This emphasis of Functionalist linguists on collocation shows that collocational meaning and structures are part of the every day life, while learners of a foreign language may go through certain levels of difficulty in developing this language competence. From the perspective of semantics, collocations can be extremely confusing as they create a collocational pattern with a unique meaning different from the sum of the meanings of its individual elements (Baker, 1992, p. 53).Still, the findings observed by researchers in L2 learning studies differ significantly from the functioning of translation, because along with the cognitive problem of learning, the translator should also develop a practical bilingual ability in matching the collocations across languages. Theoretically, situating this phenomenon within the Functionalist notion of register can shed a new light on the problem of collocation intranslation. From the angle that Functionalists view collocations,one can make sure that collocations contribute to genre cohesiveness .Presumably, this issue reaches its extreme significance in case of official (or certified) translation. Yet,a basic problem disturbing certified translationis the translators’ reliance on their prior knowledge of generic lexical and collocational groupings in producing possibletarget text collocations. The problem here is a matter of collocational predictability.The present study, then, is an attempt to address one central concern: What is the degree of predictability of official collocations as rendered by certified translators from Persian into English. The data of the study includedthe translated texts of a number of translation bureaus in Shiraz, Iran, while the sample was randomly selected from the official translations rendered by certified translators. Strikingly, the results of thestudy signify that even certified translators, with a highly professional level of language proficiency, show clear deviations in translating official collocations into English. Additionally, although they managed to transfer semantically and syntactically sound structureson the surface, their final product diverged from the collocational cohesiveness expected to exist in a standard official text. The study reveals thatcollocational groupings in such a register show a poor probability for prediction, implying that even professional translators’ prior knowledge cannot establish a strong basis for judgment in official collocational translation.The study also emphasizes that because collocation is a matter of register, new lines of research can study the phenomenon in register-specific contexts.

collocation, official translation, collocational predictability, Functionalist linguistics, register