U društvu prevedenih riječi: konvencionalizacija kolokacija u hrvatskim prijevodima s engleskog

The controversial notion of translation universals, described initially as absolute generalities of translation, is nowadays understood more along the lines of probabilistic claims about different subsets of translations. One such universal – conventionalisation – is in the focus of this study. Conventionalisation is described as a feature of translations according to which translations conform to the typical patterns of the target language, even to the degree of exaggerating them, meaning that unconventional source elements become conventional in the target. This universal is studied here by researching three conventional and three unconventional English collocations and their Croatian renderings. The aim is to determine if collocations become conventionalised through translation, with respect to genre (literary vs. popular scientific) and with respect to participants’ perception of a source collocation’s conventionality. The study combines an experiment, where participants are asked to translate two texts and answer questions about the collocations’ conventionality, and a corpus-based analysis, aimed at assessing conventionality. The results of this small-scale study show evidence of conventionalisation, more prominently in the translations of the popular scientific text, while the participants’ perception of a particular collocation also seems to have played a role. This study offers new insights into Croatian translations from English with respect to collocations and conventionalisation, as well as showing that translation universals can still be a fruitful topic of research.