Interference and Linguistic Attrition in Students of Translation Dealing with Phraseology

In translating from a foreign language into their own, Italian- speaking students of a MA course in translation tend to produce utterances that are barely acceptable, if not completely unacceptable. These errors mostly involve the production of unusual combinations of words, and result from the weak idiomatic force of restricted collocations, which often mark sub-codes that general language teaching might not cover. In addition to this, a lack of language awareness of the mother language can result in cases of interference and attrition in both the target translation texts and in the students’ essays. Collocations in dictionaries will be discussed, and combinatorial dictionaries will be presented as possible scaffolding tools students should be trained to use.