Translation and Interpreting Studies 11:2 (2016), 306–328. doi 10.1075/tis.11.2.09izw issn 1932–2798 / e-issn 1876–2700 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Te translation of Arabic lexical collocations Sattar Izwaini Collocation is the tendency of lexical items to habitually co-occur in their im- mediate environment and is a result of arbitrary attraction between words which tend to associate with each other. Lexical collocation is the association of content words. Tis article investigates the translation of Arabic lexical collocations into English and discusses the methods and challenges of dealing with Arabic collocations cross-linguistically. First, collocation types, patterns, structures and restrictions are outlined. Other issues such as semantic and syntactic features as well as register are touched upon. Arabic Corpora were used to detect and verify occurrences of collocations. Te article then discusses strategies of translating Arabic lexical collocations into English. Keywords: Arabic, lexical collocation, semantic prosody 1. Introduction Collocation refers to the tendency of lexical items to habitually co-occur in their immediate environment. At the syntagmatic level, lexical items tend to associ- ate with each other in the sense that they appear in the immediate proximity of one another. Collocation is a result of an arbitrary attraction between words, what John R. Firth calls “mutual expectancy” (Palmer 1968: 181). Tere is a special and ofen arbitrary “bond” between the lexical items that collocate with each other. Moreover, the association of words forms a regular pattern, which is a character- istic of the lexical profle of a language (Crystal and Davy 1969: 56). Collocation has a cohesive function and generates a special meaning that is diferent from the meaning of its constituent parts. Firth is accredited for the notion of collocation and has been associated with it ever since he wrote about it in late 1950s. He describes collocation as “an abstrac- tion at the syntagmatic level [and is] not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words.” (Firth 1957: 196). Terence F. Mitchell