An analysis of Basque collocations formed by onomatopoeia and verbs in a translational corpus of literary texts

Abstract

Collections of Basque proverbs and idioms have been compiled since the 16th century, but it was not until recently that interest in the study of phraseological units (PU) has arisen among researchers from different fields. This paper intends to analyze the use of a special type of phraseological unit – collocations formed by onomatopoeia and verbs – from a translational perspective in the language combination of German-Spanish-Basque. For that purpose, some introductory remarks will first be given regarding the realities of the Basque language and research on Basque phraseology. Then, the object of study will be presented, and the importance of Basque onomatopoeia will be highlighted. Since this is a corpus-based study, details on the compilation of the digitized, parallel, and multilingual corpus will be outlined, and it will be shown how these types of collocations were extracted from such a corpus in a semi-automatic way. In the translation analysis, it will be shown how one translation option stands out and how different factors (indirectness, for instance) influence Basque translations.