Translating Collocations: Evolving Trends and Practices in Twentieth-Century English-to-Arabic Translation

Many English collocations—words that typically occur together—are often perceived as having direct equivalents in Arabic and have become established in the repertoire of Modern Standard Arabic, leading to their literal translation. This article aims to examine these Arabic counterparts of English collocations to determine whether they have always functioned as standard equivalents or whether, historically, such collocations were translated in more varied ways across different stages of English–Arabic translation. In doing so, the study introduces a historical perspective to English–Arabic collocational translation—an area that has been largely examined from synchronic or pedagogical perspectives—and demonstrates how translation practices have contributed to the shaping of Modern Standard Arabic. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of forty English–Arabic translations, primarily from the twentieth century, the findings show that many collocations now perceived as direct equivalents were initially rendered through diverse translation strategies, and that translation practices gradually shifted toward greater literalism and the stabilisation of specific Arabic–English collocational correspondences