by Annika Hugosson, HUSI 2021
During our unit on technology, Professor Dibrova asked the class what we anticipated, both good and bad, as we witness incredible advances in technology and automation. We talked about surgical advances with robotics and the complicated ethics of self-driving cars, and we considered how communication technology would continue to impact globalization. As a community of language learners, some of us held concerns about whether jobs in translation and interpreting would eventually disappear with the rise of digital translation services. With all of us investing years in learning various languages, would those skills someday become obsolete? Upon reflection I think collocations—two or more words which go together as a unit of meaning—exemplify the precarity and artistry of translation, as well as the need for human touch in the form of cultural knowledge, situational awareness, and knowledge of the tiniest connotative and implied details which impact meanings in context.
I had never paid much attention to collocations until Professor Dibrova’s course routinely shined a light on them. In other language courses I’ve taken, I can’t recall any specific focus on collocations. That they are taken for granted is noteworthy in and of itself. To native speakers of a language, collocations “just sound right.” Just this morning I received a marketing email with a sentence that struck me as faintly sarcastic; I realized that the collocation “precious time” is what struck me as slightly “off,” not matching the intended tone of the sentence. While learning languages, I have learned collocations as functional phraseological units and I can use them effectively in context. However, what can we learn from disassembling a collocation to closely examine the parts which make up the unit? What can we learn from a language, and about language as a tool more generally, by attempting our own collocations? What can we learn from laughing at our mistakes when we inadvertently and inevitably create nonsensical combinations?
In a diverse class that included native Slavic language speakers as well as newcomers to this language family, I was surprised that creating collocations was sometimes a sort of equalizer among the students. Examining the tricky assembly of collocations was an exercise in understanding that translation is anything but simple. The tiniest detail meant a collocation could not properly exist in Ukrainian, and explanations were rarely simple. And sometimes collocations simply didn’t work; they just didn’t exist. Consider a few of the English collocations that are possible with the common verb “to make.” One can “make the bed,” “make an effort,” “make room (for something),” and “make sure (of something).” Where might you start in order to explicate the different functions and meanings of “to make” in each of these collocations, to a non-native English speaker? Why does “making the bed” most often refer to rearranging bed linens, rather than assembling the actual piece of furniture? Why does someone “make an effort” rather than “create an effort?” What is the difference between “to make sure” and “to be sure?” These were the types of questions I confronted as I tripped my way through forming collocations in Ukrainian. Despite the challenging nature of making collocations, this made learning Ukrainian fun. I played it safe with some combinations (even some of these turned out not as “safe” as I thought), while with others I stretched into less comfortable realms of meaning, playing with different parts of speech and testing the somewhat malleable boundaries of language. Listening to Professor Dibrova’s explanations of both successful and failed Ukrainian collocations was one of the more illuminating aspects of this course.
To revisit the topic of machine translation, Google Translate has helped me in many tricky travel situations. I have stumbled my way through taxi negotiations by passing a phone back and forth with a driver. I have done careful inspections of restaurant menus through my iPhone lens—using the camera to instantly translate a page in front of me. But even quotidian tasks like these are sometimes imperfectly executed through machine translation. I have needed to step back and think critically about why a particular phrase or sentiment is not getting through, making manual corrections, little tweaks, until my fellow interlocutor gets that burst of realization and we both sigh in relief that we hurdled that particular language barrier. I have frowned at menus when I couldn’t even begin to understand what certain items were, though I might understand each word individually via machine translation.
Language is a tool for communication but it also produces and is produced by culture, a force that is endlessly complex and constantly changing. And while I have no doubt machine translation services will only continue to improve, I imagine collocations will be one of the final, tricky frontiers for linguistic automation because so many of them carry sociolinguistic nuance. Especially with music, poetry, and literature, collocations can be played with, words and phrases can be layered with multiple meanings. Teasing out these layers and getting to a level of linguistic performance that we might be able to do that in a non-native tongue is no small feat. I am not sure Google Translate will be able to keep up.
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Note: For more on collocations in Ukrainian, watch our Seminar in Ukrainian Studies about Yuri Shevchuk's new collocations dictionary. With remarks from Volodymyr Dibrova, who used the resource in his teaching this past summer, the seminar will include a presentation by Yuri Shevchuk and a Q&A with the audience. The event is on September 22, 2021, and the recording will remain on YouTube.