ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the summary of major findings in quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the distinctive features of the collocation distribution patterns produced by Chinese translators. The quantitative analysis clarifies the relationship between collocations and the indicators of translation universals, and proposes that the general features of collocation distribution be examined in terms of the degree of collocability, delexicalisation and semantic prosody. The qualitative analysis demonstrates the existence of translation universals in the translators’ translation outputs. Generally speaking, the findings from the quantitative and qualitative analyses have provided evidence to demonstrate that the use of collocations plays a very important part in language production. In some sense, the use of collocations can be a benchmark to measure how well a second language (L2) user is accepted by a particular speech community where that L2 is used.
