ABSTRACT
Collocations are combinations of usually two, sometimes three or more
words that are paired and naturally go together, be that in a spoken or
written form. In other words, collocation is an integral unit of every
language, and as such, it occurs commonly and adds spontaneous and
vivid coloring to the written and spoken language. English collocations
with all their semantic, grammatical, and lexical characteristics have
their equivalents in many languages, but they may or may not appear
in the same grammatical form. In some languages, it is difficult to
find equivalents for all the English collocations, which can make their
transfer and translation complicated. The purpose of this study is to
locate errors that undergraduate English language (EFL) students at the
University of Tetova make while translating English collocations into
Albanian. The theoretical support of this study relies on other similar
studies of collocations and various problems that researchers face while
translating collocations from one language into another. Additionally,
this study is of mixed type, both qualitative and quantitative. The study
data were collected through a test, in which 71 undergraduate students
of different academic years were presented with 60 collocations, with
the purpose of identifying some of the most common errors students
make while translating them from English into Albanian. The collected
data contains demographic information, as well as the types of errors
that undergraduate English language students make while translating
collocations. The findings suggest that students’ errors during translation
are mainly of lexical and grammatical types.