Lesson Material

In Lesson One we discussed the concept of message and form and stressed that in translation, we need to transfer the message, and not necessarily the form, of the source text into the target language. In the subsequent lessons we explored many topics that serve to help us to achieve this objective, which we'll now review and analyze in terms of how they relate to the maxim of prioritizing message above form.

In this lesson we’ve explored how words are used together both in collocational patterning or tendencies and in idioms and fixed expressions. We also took a look at conjunctions and connecting phrases, which are fixed expressions that help to organize and connect words and thoughts to one another. We’ve offered numerous resource lists with many examples, but these lists are by no means exhaustive.

So far, in this lesson we’ve been examining collocation between words, how words have a tendency to be used with other words in a given language. Generally, this usage is fairly flexible in form. For the collocation to “pay a bill” we can create such phrases as “will pay the bill”, “the bill has been paid”, “the payment of the bill”, “bill pay”, etc. and still maintain the meaning.