What it is
Some stretches of text are assembled word by word and others are fetched whole. Running text mixes the two, and the mixture does not show on the surface: what looks assembled can be one choice, and what looks settled can be free. Fixedness is a position on a scale that belongs to a community of users rather than to the words.
Two directions have been tried. Sinclair set an open-choice principle, under which every position is a fresh selection, against an idiom principle, under which a language user has semi-preconstructed phrases available and takes each as one choice. Corpas Pastor works from criteria rather than counts, dividing units that must combine with other signs, the colocaciones and locuciones, from units that form a complete utterance alone, the enunciados fraseológicos. Granger and Paquot find the field itself split between that phraseological approach and a distributional one built on frequency, its scope unstable because its borders with semantics, morphology, syntax and discourse are fuzzy.
Two boundaries follow. The technique records keep the operation; this record keeps the unit and its warrant. A combination anchored to a term stays on the term record however fixed it is. And the next record asks not how fixed a wording is but how far it runs.
Where the fixity comes from
Nothing prescribes these wordings. They are attested rather than laid down, so they change when usage drifts and not when an instrument is amended. Where an instrument or a house guide does fix one, the warrant is a different one and this record stops applying.
- The evidence is text. Erman and Warren found 55.38 per cent of the positions in spoken and written English filled by prefabricated material, 58.6 per cent in speech against 52.3 in writing. Their criterion is restricted exchangeability: one member at least resists a synonym without a change of meaning, of function or of idiomaticity.
- A proportion does not establish which wording is right. It describes a sample, and the sample carries a genre and a language with it: those figures are about English at large and settle nothing about a certificate.
- A count also needs a rule before it can count. A sequence must be admitted as a unit before its occurrences can be added up, and the threshold that admits it is declared rather than observed.
Consequences for translation
The useful question is not whether a wording is fixed but how fixed, and in which of the two languages.
- Fixedness does not travel with the content. A fixed source unit is no warrant for inventing a target one, and a freely composed source phrase can face a target slot with one settled filler. Each side is judged against its own community.
- A deviation from a conventional unit is unidiomatic and not wrong, so it belongs among conventions and reaches the client as a suggestion. A reviser who records it as an error claims a warrant the wording does not have.
- Check first whether the wording is laid down somewhere. The same string can be conventional in one text type and prescribed in another, and only then does a deviation cost the document something.
- Frequency claims are bound to a genre and a direction. A proportion measured on general language is no authority over a certificate, and a claim stated without a direction is wrong rather than incomplete.
Examples
EN>NL
- Source: where appropriate
- Target: in voorkomend geval
- Comment: Rome I, Article 3(4), where the phrase qualifies provisions of Community law as implemented in the Member State of the forum. Nothing in the regulation fixes the wording; the instrument attests it. Three words answer two, and composing rather than retrieving gives waar passend, which is Dutch and not this register's unit.
EN>DE
- Source: where appropriate
- Target: gegebenenfalls
- Comment: Same provision. German has settled on one adverb where English has two words and Dutch three, so one slot is filled at three lengths and none of the three renders the others. Where a wording sits on the cline is a fact about each language on its own.
EN>IT
- Source: where appropriate
- Target: se del caso
- Comment: The same provision once more. Nobody laid any of these units down and none can be derived from the others, which is what a conventional warrant looks like from the inside; a translator reaching for the compositional dove appropriato writes Italian the drafting community does not use.
References
- Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Describing English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Corpas Pastor, G. (1996). Manual de fraseología española. Madrid: Gredos.
- Erman, B. and Warren, B. (2000). "The idiom principle and the open choice principle." Text 20(1), 29 to 62, at pp. 31, 32 and 37.
- Granger, S. and Paquot, M. (2008). "Disentangling the phraseological web." In S. Granger and F. Meunier (eds), Phraseology: An interdisciplinary perspective, 27 to 49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Messina Fajardo, T. A. (2021). "El lenguaje coloquial en Galdós. Locuciones y paremias con elementos somáticos en Fortunata y Jacinta." eHumanista/IVITRA 19, 366 to 381, at p. 368.
- 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 3(4), English, Dutch, German and Italian language versions.