Translation of Collocations into Arabic: A Descriptive Corpus-Based Study

Translation of collocations represents a constant translation problem, where extensive linguistic and cultural gaps between languages result in a lack of equivalence of specific-culture, and bound collocational patterns. This study aims to investigate a number of English collocations and their Arabic translations, in order to measure the degree of domestication versus foreignization in translated Arabic texts. This study applies Baker’s theoretical framework of equivalence and translation strategies (2018), and makes use of the parallel corpus: OPUS2, on the corpus analysis web-based tool Sketch Engine. This study has shown that domestication predominantly characterises the translation of collocations in Arabic, where equivalence is usually achieved using different translation strategies.