The study aims to list English Verb + Noun (V+N) combinations that are classified into three categories: free combinations, collocations and idiomatic expressions and their Indonesian translation as found in an English-Indonesian
business news parallel corpus. V+N combination is one of the important elements in English language learning, particularly for writing, translating or speaking with natural-sounding English. The list may be of great help to learner, translator or
writer in dealing with V+N combinations.
The data of V+N combinations come from texts in seven-month editions of an English business magazine, BusinessWeek (Source Texts) and its translation versions published by BusinessWeek Indonesian edition (Target Texts) that have
been compiled into a homegrown parallel corpus. The collected data, V+N combinations and their translation into Indonesian, are classified into free
combinations, collocations and idioms and analyzed based on the frequency of use, the syntactic patterns, the translations into Indonesian, verb keyword frequency with noun collocates and frequency of V+N collocation and its direct
equivalents. The study reveals that the most frequent V+N combinations are V+N free
combinations (63%), followed by V+N collocation (34%) and V+N idiomatic expression (3%). The English V+N combinations come in many different
syntactic patterns and their Indonesian translations take the same syntactic pattern. The syntactic patterns, however, sometimes differ in two languages, where the English V+N combinations are translated into just a verb in Indonesian.
Inaccuracies in the translation are in most cases caused by inappropriate choice of the verb equivalents. It is also found that the nouns in the
V+N free combination are mostly concrete in nature while those in the V+N collocation are abstract in nature. These findings can be used in building awareness of the complexity of translating
V+N combinations, especially in the case of English V+N collocations. The list of V+N collocations and their Indonesian translations can be used for compiling bilingual glossaries or collocation dictionaries. Further research on V+N collocation is needed such as whether it is true they cause difficulties to the learners in writing, or translating, how to use V+N collocation in writing and translation, make comparison of V+N collocation in
other type of texts, etc. The English-Indonesian business news parallel corpus can be further explored to find out about other combinations as well as other aspects of language use. |