The Use of Parallel Corpora in Translator Training
Kefei Wang · Media in Foreign Language Instruction · 2004
This paper probes into the application of parallel corpora to translator training, based on the Chinese-English Parallel Corpora (about 30 million characters/words in size) created by The National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, BFSU. It shows that, as far as translator training is concerned, a parallel corpus is an available instrument for reference or a platform for training, the function can be seen in the ways as: 1) providing rich parallel samples for a key word (a word or a phrase); 2) providing for a structure of high frequency various kinds of parallel samples, which can be collected for analysis and imitation; 3) providing sufficient as well as random retrievable translations (of one specific original text) for comparison. This paper also argues that the special function of parallel corpora and concordancer in translator training cannot be replaced by any training textbooks or reference books; nevertheless, its use in translator training awaits widening and its potentiality awaits exploiting.