The treatment of vocabulary combinations in English-Spanish translations of translation students: a didactic analysis

Abstract

This article analyzes the way in which a group of translation students translated certain lexical combinations found in newspaper articles from English into Spanish. The study focuses on the work of said group who, without having received any previous theory-based training on translation strategies or documentation techniques, embarked on the task of translating the texts proposed by the professors, which contained several lexical and phraseological items of varying difficulty. Translations were analyzed to determine the degree of semantic accuracy and the documentation tools that might have been used. The results make it possible to create recommendations for translation professors to act as facilitators in the learning process by using a flexible methodology that takes into account students’ previous knowledge and offers specific guidance on how to approach the documentation process in relation to phraseological units, in order to find appropriate equivalents for those units in the target text.