《The Comparable Corpus-Based Chinese-English Translation》.docVIP

The Comparable Corpus-Based Chinese-English Translation— A Case Study of City Introduction by Guangsa JinPeking University, China Abstract Since only a limited pool of qualified native English-speaking translators can do Chinese-English translation, it is inevitable for native Chinese-speaking translators to translate out of their native language. Influenced by their mother tongue, Chinese translators often use some awkward expressions, which do not exist in English, in the translated texts. This paper aims to explore how a comparable corpus can be applied in Chinese-English translation to assist native Chinese-speaking translators to make their translated texts sound natural to native English speakers. To illustrate the point, a comparable corpus on the subject of city introduction is constructed. With the help of comparable corpus analysis tools, sentence length, lexical density, and other statistics which can reflect the stylistic features of the translated texts are derived. It is argued that a comparable corpus which can provide examples of natural expressions in the target language plays an irreplaceable role in terminology extraction, awkward collocation spotting and it is also can pick up some small errors which are often neglected by non-native English-speaking translators such as the usage of articles. Introduction n terms of the prerequisites of translators, the ideal candidates would be the native speakers of the target language. This guideline is followed by many translation agencies for International institutes. It is also clearly stated in the Occupational Outlook Handbook of the U.S. Department of Labor that the nature of translation is for the translators to put their secondary, or passive language into their native, or active language. However, this is not the case in Chinese-English translation. According to Xu Meijiang (2004), a senior translator in Chinas Central Translation Bureau, though some qualified native English-speaking translators