A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF TRACEABILITY EXPRESSIONS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF GERMAN-ENGLISH COLLOCATIONS

Although translations have been carried out since mankind existed, the analysis of translations of traceability and digitalization expressions from English into the German language and vice versa has been receiving more attention in the last decades, mainly due to the digitalization and the Industry 4.0. This article aims to solve this need by carrying out a English-German contrastive analysis based on the Gross’ Lexicon-Grammar theory (1975) and the object class theory (Gross, 1995), focusing on a single class, the traceability (NomTrace). The corpus of this article is based on traceability expressions extracted from the Guideline for the entire supply and value chain publication released by the German electrical association (ZVEI), and verified through a case study from practitioners in Germany. This guideline aims to be a reference for the identification and traceability in the electrical and electronics industry for the entire supply and value chain. If traceability is the ability to trace the history, (ISO 9000, 2005), this research points out the importance to translate it and communicate it appropiately. This paper can contribute as a research paper, which can be used for the exploitation of corpus related to traceability with teaching purposes for the training of translation of traceability definitions and traceability information defined in supply chain contracts. In addition, it represents a useful resource for translator training since it offers the wider context of expressions in traceability language, which are not included in dictionaries. The paper attempts to fill a gap in corpus-based studies of traceability collocations. The influence of anglicisms in the digitalization and traceability field language both in Spanish and in German has been observed in this research work. Research results demonstrate the influence of English collocations as the majority of the specialized literature is written in English as the majority of research works are neither in German nor in Spanish, but in English and from the USA. The research presented in this paper has important implications for theory and practice in the phraseology in general and in the collocations in particular. This study contributes to enrich the literature related to phraseological units, developing a list of German-English expressions related to the traceability field using collocations and taking into account expressions related to traceability. Research results aim to be a part of an academic collocations base, which can support the academic community standardizing multilingual English-German traceability translations. One of the originality of this study is the identification of traceability collocations and their verification through a case study. The paper attempts to fill a gap in corpus-based studies of traceability collocations. Findings from this research support the Thun (1978)’s statement about the repetition of certain collocations in traceability contexts. The contrastive analysis not only reveals their grammatical structures and phraseological patterns, but also their genre–specific features.