Some collocations are quite arbitrary. What possible link can there be between rain, cats, and dogs? And yet the English say It s raining cats and dogs. Others can be clearly motivated. The equivalent French expression II pleut comme vache qui pisse (' It's raining like a cow urinating ') is quite graphic.
Good translation is often a case of either knowing or serendipitously hitting on the appropriate collocation (which will not always be in the dictionary).
Even people translating into their own language can get the collocation wrong, as happened with the student translator who produced the sentence lost in a sea oj explanations, which is actually a mixing of two separate collocations (drowning in a sea I lost in a fog). Yet it should be said that collocations are not necessarily always right or wrong, but often simply more or less acceptable. You might get some idea of degrees of acceptability of collocation by asking yourself whether one can say the cow stro//ed over to the fence.
Because collocations are judged on a sliding scale of acceptability rather than just as right or wrong, not all speakers of a language agree on what is or is not a collocation. The Canadian theorists Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet (1958:89) give the translation pair Echappe aI 'analyse I bajjles analysis, which baffles quite a number of English people because they do not accept that bajjles analysis is an English expression (maybe they've only ever heard 'defies analysis'). The fact that the dictionary definition of 'baffle' does not preclude it from collocating with 'analysis ' does not, of course, mean that the collocation exists.
For more information, visit portuguese to english translation and sociolinguistic in translation
