How Trainee Translators Analyse Lexico-Grammatical Patterns

In this study, we examine the ability of advanced students of specialised translation to identify and analyse 'generic collocations' in a corpus of specialised multilingual texts (mostly technical or scientific texts in English, French and German). In general, we find that our students attach much importance to frequently-occurring 'clusters' or 'n-grams'. However the students find it difficult to see these fragments as productive patterns of wording, or to assign a rhetorical function to them. This rather fixed view of phraseology suggests that there may be shortcomings in the way that we as teachers conceptualise and problematise the concept of the 'lexico-grammatical pattern' for our students. In the second part of this study, we suggest a different way of identifying and conceptualising phraseological phenomena using the metalanguage of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG).