Collocational Patterns in Translated vs. Non-Translated Criminal Judgments: A Case Study

The present paper is part of a pilot study conducted within the framework of an ongoing Ph.D. research project focused on a translation-oriented contrastive study of the phraseologisms in use in criminal judgments delivered in Italy, England and Wales, and Spain. The aim of this brief paper is to compare the use of lexical collocations in a monolingual comparable corpus of Italian criminal judgments delivered by the national Supreme Court (Corte Suprema di Cassazione), and criminal judgments delivered at a supranational level (the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union) translated into Italian. A case study is presented on the collocational patterns involving one of the most frequent lexical items of the corpus. From a methodological point of view, though essentially monolingual, the study combines a genre and a corpus perspective.