The present paper examines the transfer of nomino-adjectival collocations based on the word ‘femme’ (‘woman’) in the literary translation from French into Italian and Polish. The lexical connection analysed in the article can be defined as the habitual juxtaposition of a word with another word (or words) that has a significant frequency in a given language. The research corpus comprises seven Michel Houellebecq’s novels written originally in French and their Italian and Polish versions. The theoretical part of the paper aims to present phraseotranslation and phraseotraductol-ogy, which are the new subbranches in phraseology. Then, the empirical part proposes the analysis of techniques used in transferring collocations.

The descriptions of characters’ eating habits recurring in Michel Houellebecq’s novels make a complex system of signs functioning at the textual and intertextual level as well as in reference to the extratextual reality, i.e., the situation of the Western society at the turn of the 21st century. The aim of this article is to identify the key points of this system and determine the possible directions of interpretation of these culinary motifs. For contemporary decadents from Houellebecq’s novels, lone feasts are a new kind of ritual, which – unlike the traditional “ceremonies of eating” – does not help maintain interpersonal relationships but only provides temporary relief and helps them forget about problems.