Exploring Collocation and Semantic Prosody of English and Urdu Translation Equivalents in Cross-linguistic newspapers

Abstract

The present study aims to explore collocational behavior and semantic prosody of English content words and their Urdu translation equivalents using two cross-linguistic newspapers. The English corpus was built based on the editorials from The Sun which is one of the most circulated English newspaper in UK and the Urdu corpus was culled from the editorials in Daily Jung which is one of the most circulated Urdu newspaper in Pakistan. The analysis of semantic prosody was carried out using the latest version of #LancsBox (Brezina, 2015). The identification and categorization of the semantic prosody is based on Stubbs’ (1995) classification of semantic prosody. The findings of the study show that semantic prosody and semantic environment of English lexical items and their Urdu first translation equivalents significantly vary. This led to the interpretation that the first translation equivalents identified in the widely used bilingual English to Urdu dictionaries are not equivalents as they convey entirely different semantic prosody. The findings of the study also highlighted the incorrect and inconsistent treatment of semantic prosody in the Monolingual Urdu and English dictionaries. Moreover, the present study emphasizes the pedagogical implications and presents recommendations intended to direct future research in this area.