Identifying translation features in multi-word lexical units

Multi-word lexical units can often be rendered by different lexicalizations in the target language. Variation in the translation of multi-word lexical units, specifically multi-word cognates, can be regarded as an indicator of interference, since there is evidence of a priming effect which leads to the production of such units in interlinguistic communication (Kroll & Stewart 1994). This paper studies the production of multi-word cognates, i.e. formally similar lexical items which are semantically equivalent in two languages, in ecological experimental translation based on real translation tasks in a classroom situation. For this purpose real text units and multiple-choice tasks are used, and the data thus obtained are compared with instances extracted from an English-Spanish comparable corpus of original texts and a Spanish corpus of translated text. The results show that there is a correlation between the spontaneous production of multi-word cognates, as evidenced experimentally, and their frequency as attested by corpora.