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1、The Comparable Corpus-Based Chinese-English Translation A Case Study of City Introduction AbstractSince 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 l
2、anguage. 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 t
3、o 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 sty
4、listic 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 a
5、re often neglected by non-native English-speaking translators such as the usage of articles.Introductionn 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 ins
6、titutes. 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 translatio
7、n. According to Xu Meijiang (2004), a senior translator in Chinas Central Translation Bureau, though some qualified native English-speaking translators are involved in C-E translating, editing or proofreading; large volumes of C-E translations are done by native Chinese-speaking translators alone. T
8、he present situation will not be changed in the near future for two reasons: first, only a limited pool of qualified native English-speaking translators are available; second, the fee charged by native English-speaking translators is much higher than those of their Chinese counterparts. The statisti
9、cs from Beijing Evening News (2007) state that 60% of the translation market demand cannot be met, and China is in desperate need for qualified C-E translators. The present problems would be how to improve the quality of the C-E translation done by native Chinese-speaking translators. Corpora would
10、be a helpful tool to arm them.The development of computer technology and Internet make the comparable corpus-based approach accessible. In the corpus-based approach, two subcorpora are to be constructed:Subcorpus AC-E translation done by Chinese translators;Subcorpus BEnglish texts on the same subje
11、ct written by native English speakers.Since equivalents can be easily extracted from aligned parallel corpora, they are extensively used in translation practice.First, since computers are widely used in translators everyday work, electronic translation texts are available, which enables the construc
12、tion of Subcorpus A. Second, the Internet provides a huge archive of texts written by native English speakers, storing the most recently updated language and information on various subjects and making the construction of Subcorpus B easier than ever before. Third, the advancement of software enginee
13、ring offers tools to process the corpus. Customizable corpus analysis software is produced to meet different research and study needs. Wordsmith (Scott 1996), MonoConc (Barlow 1999) and AntConc (Laurence Anthony 2007) are the most common corpus analysis software packages and are widely used in the f
14、ields of literature, pedagogy, linguistics and translation studies. Machine-readable texts and computer programs make quantitative language study possible, offering new approaches to improve the quality of translation.This paper aims to examine how comparable corpora can be used to enhance the quali
15、ty of the Chinese-English translations done by non-native English-speaking translators. To illustrate the point, comparable corpora comprising original English texts and translated texts into English on the subject of City Introduction are constructed and the question of how they can help translator
16、s who are translating out of their native language to use idiomatic expressions is examined.1 Corpus-based Translation Study: A ReviewThe 20th century saw a dramatic change in translation studiesa transformation from traditional prescriptive study into descriptive study, which directly promotes the
17、development of corpus-based translation studies. Scholars and translation education professionals, who used to conduct translation studies or provide translation trainings on an intuitive basis, started to do empirical research, relying on both original and translated texts. Therefore, various kinds
18、 of translational corpora are constructed to meet different needs in descriptive and practical translation studies.1.1 Current Research1.1.1 Corpus-based Descriptive Translation StudyIt is generally acknowledged that Mona Baker is a pioneer in corpus-based translation studies, since she was the firs
19、t person to conceive the idea of translational corpus construction and actually set up onethe Translational English Corpus (TEC). TEC, a project funded by the British Academy, was started in 1996 and opened to the public on line in 1999. Translated from European languages such as French, German and
20、Spanish and non-European languages such as Chinese and Thai, the texts in the corpus are taken directly from publications. Mona Baker and other faculty members in the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) have done translation studies on the basis of TEC. Basically, TEC-
21、based translation studies fall into three categories: features of translationese; studies on translators style; social and cultural influence on translation.Compared with original texts, translationese, the language of translated texts has its own special features. Thus comparable studies have been
22、done to reveal the differences. Baker (1996) observed that the translated version usually had the features of explication, simplification, normalization and leveling out. By making a comparison between TEC and BNC on the usage of that which precedes an objective clause, Olohan and Baker (2000) found
23、 that the ratio of that was much higher than that in BNC, which further demonstrated the feature of explication. Besides simplification, explication and normalization, Sara Laviosa (1998) added three more featuresavoidance of repetitions present in the source text, discourse transfer and law of inte
24、rference, and distinctive distribution of target-language items.TEC was used to study the different styles of translators. By making a comparison between the type-token ratio, sentence length and narrative structure of the translation of Peter Bush and Peter Clark, two British translators, Baker (20
25、00) came to the conclusion that Clark had a more direct style than Bush.Cultural differences between nations are revealed through comparisons between TEC and texts originally written in English. For example, Laviosa (2002) showed the differences between cultural messages by making a comparison betwe
26、en the news subcorpora of the English Comparable Corpus (ECC), a corpus constructed by herself, which included 396 articles from the Guardian and Europe Journal and the news subcorpora in TEC which included news translated from German, Slavic, Italian, etc.Descriptive translation study lays the foun
27、dation for practical translation studies. The universal of translation revealed in corpus-based descriptive translation studies suggests ways translators can make their translation sound more natural to the target language readers. Besides, the methodologies used in descriptive translation study are
28、 very inspiring to those involved in translation practice and in other practical translation studies. 1.1.2 Corpus-based Practical Translation StudyWhereas a wide array of different kinds of corpora has been applied in descriptive translation studies, exploration has been made to adapt corpora to pr
29、actical translation studies. Federico Zanettin raised the idea of using corpora in the training of translators in 1998 and further illustrated the point by presenting an experiment in which the Olympics corpus was used by a group of trainee translators to translate an Italian sports article into Eng
30、lish. Since then, scholars began to pay attention to the role corpora could play in translation education and new approaches were developed. Jennifer Pearson (2000) noted that parallel corpora were very useful in the translator training environment because they could show the trainees how profession
31、al translators have overcome specific translation problems. Natalie Kbler (2000) illustrated how to use specialized and general corpora and corpus query tools to look for term candidates and their phraseology. Krista Varantola (2000) introduced a new type of corpusdisposable corpora which were used
32、as performance-enhancing tools in the training of prospective professional translators and she also demonstrated how to apply Wordsmith Tools in corpus analysis. 1.2 Problems in Corpus-based C-E Translation StudySince equivalents can be easily extracted from aligned parallel corpora, they are extens
33、ively used in translation practice. The significant role parallel corpora play in terminology extraction is not in dispute here. However, when focusing on Chinese-English translation study, relying solely on parallel corpora represents a problem.First of all, high-quality C-E translation are compara
34、tively rare since most C-E translations are done by native Chinese translators, who live in a Chinese-speaking environment and have little peer support from native English speakers. One can easily spot unconventional and creative expressions in these translations which, in most cases, confuse native
35、 English readers. These translations can hardly meet the need of communication between source language writers and target language readers. Therefore, the quality of a parallel corpus containing poor translations as raw materials is in doubt. Secondly, it is difficult to align a parallel corpus of h
36、igh-quality C-E translation since English is a language of hypotaxis while Chinese is a language of parataxis. To make the translation sound natural to native English readers, translators need to bring out the implied logic in Chinese texts by using discourse markers or other means. Absolute equival
37、ence in syntactic structures does not exist. Therefore, a huge amount of aligning work will be involved in parallel corpus compiling since automatic construction is difficult to carry out.Therefore, a comparable corpus, which provides samples of language as they are used naturally by native English
38、speakers, is extremely useful for translators who translate out of their mother tongue. A comparable corpus has one collection of texts written by native speakers of the target language on the same topic of the translated texts (city introduction is the topic in this paper). Translators can imitate
39、the sentence pattern and idiomatic expressions used by native speakers.2 MethodologyThis paper aims to illustrate the value a monolingual comparable corpus has in Chinese-English translation practice and to demonstrate how a comparable corpus can be used in C-E translation practice to enhance the qu
40、ality of the translation done by a non-native English speaker. Therefore, it is a practical translation study.2.1 Comparable CorpusIn the experiment, a comparable corpus which comprises two English subcorporaa translated text collection and an original text collection, is constructed. The comparable
41、 corpus is the most important translation corpus for translators who translate out of their mother tongue. As already mentioned it is indispensable for native Chinese translators to be involved in C-E translation, since the ultimate goal in their translation practice should be making the translated
42、texts understandable and sound natural to native target-language readers. The aim is not easy to be achieved in C-E translation without the participation of native English speakers. Therefore, the comparable corpus, which serves as an English consultant, plays an irreplaceable role in C-E translatio
43、n practice.2.2 Corpus Analysis ToolsDifferent from paper texts, electronic corpora can be processed by computer automatically. In this study, three freely available programs are used in corpus analysis, terminology extraction and corpus construction, namely, A Corpus Workers Toolkit (ACWT), AntConc
44、and GoTagger.3 A Case Study of City Introduction: Procedure3.1 Corpus ConstructionAs the largest corpus, the Internet provides an almost unlimited number of electronic articles updated every minute. The vast pool of information serves well as a translation corpus resource. The comparable corpus used
45、 in the experiment is a disposable corpus which has two subcorpora on the same subjectCity Introduction. 3.1.1 Subcorpus Atranslated texts done by native Chinese speakersTwo steps are involved in Subcorpus As constructiondata collecting and compilation.In the process of data collecting, it was found
46、 that C-E translated articles on city introduction can be obtained from several kinds of website, including tourism websites, websites to invite investment and local government websites. Since tourism websites, in most cases, are commercial websites, the city introduction unavoidably has several des
47、criptive paragraphs and functions as an advertisement. Therefore, most articles compiled in the corpus are from government-run websites and mainly provide factual information. Therefore, the search strategies involved in the data collecting process are quite simpledownloading the city introduction p
48、ages from Chinas local government websites (usually provincial capital cities websites).However, web pages cannot be processed by corpus analysis software directly. The articles in html format need to be converted into txt format. In this step, A Corpus Workers Toolkit (ACWT) is used to do the conve
49、rsion. First, the web page is opened in the NoteTab. Then HTMLText Conversion tool is run to get the article in txt form. After converting all texts into txt form, the merge file tool is applied to obtain a single file. ACWT saves the tedious and mechanical job of corpus compilation dramatically.3.1.2 Subcorpus Boriginal texts written by native English speakersSince the articles in Subcorpus A are factual information on cities, an English on-line electronic enc
