What it is
A binomial is two items of the same word class joined by and or or and used as one thing rather than as two: terms and conditions, cease and desist. The order is not free, and that fixity separates a binomial from a coordination assembled on the spot. Triplets behave the same way.
What varies from pair to pair, and all that matters downstream, is the relation between the members. Near synonyms carry one content item between them, so one of the two could go; complementary members each carry something the other does not, and nothing in the surface form marks which kind is present.
A pair anchored to a term belongs on the term record, because which near synonym a term pairs with is a fact about that term. This section keeps the pair that would still stand if every term were lifted out of the sentence. The criterion is extent, and it is this reference's own decision, because no source consulted here lays one down. The technique records keep the operation; this record keeps the unit and its warrant.
Where the fixity comes from
Nothing prescribes these pairs. They are attested rather than laid down, so the wording changes when usage drifts rather than when an instrument is amended; where an instrument does fix a pair, this record stops applying.
- Pontrandolfo's COSPE corpus holds 782 criminal judgments in Spanish, Italian and English, and admits a sequence as a phraseological unit only at five occurrences per two million words and in at least five different judgments. On that basis Spanish judgments yield 5,059 doublet tokens across 202 types, English 3,459 across 116 and Italian 1,887 across 82. The counts are bound to that genre, and the Spanish figure describes a text community, not a language.
- The English inventory in circulation is older and differently sourced. Goldfarb's 1964 review of Mellinkoff lists aid and comfort, cease and desist, fit and proper and give, bequeath, and devise: evidence of what was current, not a finding about fixity. Spanish judgments close with pronunciamos, mandamos y firmamos, a triplet on the codified edge.
Consequences for translation
The question is never whether a pair may be reduced but whether this pair may be, and the answer is not in the source language.
- The relation between the members decides, not the length. If removing one member removes content, the pair is complementary and any reduction is a loss.
- Neither reduction nor expansion is a default. One English doublet at one provision of one regulation becomes a single word in Dutch and stays a pair in Spanish and Portuguese: the direction is a property of the pair and of the target community, not of the technique.
- The objection belongs among conventions rather than errors, since a deviation costs idiomaticity and not effect. The exception is a pair inside a wording an instrument fixes, where the reduction is unavailable.
- A frequency claim does not travel across genres or directions. A count from criminal judgments says nothing about a lease, and a claim about pairing habits stated without a direction is wrong rather than incomplete.
Examples
EN>NL
- Source: rights and obligations constituting the terms and conditions
- Target: rechten en verplichtingen waardoor de voorwaarden
- Comment: Rome I, Article 6(4)(d). Two English pairs stand side by side and the Dutch keeps one while halving the other: the complementary pair survives as rechten en verplichtingen, the near synonyms land on voorwaarden. A translator following the pair rather than the relation would write voorwaarden en bepalingen, sending the reader after two things where the regulation has one.
EN>ES
- Source: the terms and conditions governing the issuance
- Target: los términos y condiciones que regulan la emisión
- Comment: Same instrument, same provision. The English pair survives intact, so what settled the Dutch case was the target community, not the source unit. Reducing it here because the two English words say one thing would be reasoning about English.
EN>PT
- Source: the terms and conditions governing the issuance
- Target: os termos e as condições que regulam a emissão
- Comment: The pair is kept here too, with the definite article repeated before each member where the Spanish repeats nothing. Two communities that both keep a pair do not shape it alike, and os termos e condições is not what this text says.
References
- Malkiel, Y. (1959). "Studies in irreversible binomials." Lingua 8, 113 to 160.
- Mellinkoff, D. (1963). The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown, pp. xiv, 454.
- Goldfarb, R. L. (1964). Review of David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law. Michigan Law Review 63, 180 to 186.
- Gustafsson, M. (1984). "The syntactic features of binomial expressions in legal English." Text 4(1-3), from p. 123.
- Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. Applied Linguistics and Language Study. London: Routledge.
- Pontrandolfo, G. (2015). "Investigating judicial phraseology with COSPE: a contrastive corpus-based study." In C. Fantinuoli and F. Zanettin (eds), New directions in corpus-based translation studies, 137 to 160. Berlin: Language Science Press, at pp. 141, 144 and 147.
- Regulation (EC) No 593/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 June 2008 on the law applicable to contractual obligations (Rome I), Article 6(4)(d), English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese language versions.