The Portrait of Dorian Gray: A corpus-based analysis of translated verb + noun (object) collocations in Peninsular and Colombian Spanish

Abstract

Corpus-based Translation Studies have promoted research on the features of translated language, by focusing on the process and product of translation, from a descriptive perspective. Some of these features have been proposed by Toury [31] under the term of laws of translation, namely the law of growing standardisation and the law of interference. The law of standardisation appears to be particularly at play in diatopy, and more specifically in the case of transnational languages (e.g. English, Spanish, French, German). In fact, some studies have revealed the tendency to standardise the diatopic varieties of Spanish in translated language [8, 9, 11, 12]. This paper focuses on verb + noun (object) collocations of Spanish translations of The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Two different varieties have been chosen (Peninsular and Colombian Spanish). Our main aim is to establish whether the Colombian Spanish translation actually matches the variety spoken in Colombia or it is closer to general or standard Spanish. For this purpose, the techniques used to translate this type of collocations in both Spanish translations will be analysed. Furthermore, the diatopic distribution of these collocations will be studied by means of large corpora.