An Empirical Study on Translation Practice with Parallel Corpus as an Aid
HE Wen-zhao · Journal of Jiaxing University · 2013
The author attempts to test the effect of using parallel corpus to aid translation practice by an experiment.This study is based on a Chinese-English parallel corpus over 700,000 words,with the assistant of a specially designed concordancer for bilingual searching,due to the insufficient bilingual text samples and the less specialized searching tools used in the previous researches.The Chinese source text for this translation experiment is a passage from a Chinese local government work report and the parallel corpus which is used as a reference aid for the experimental group is a Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of Government Work Report compiled by the author.Both of the two groups of subjects are required to finish the translation in 90 minutes.Data collected are calculated and analyzed after the experiment.The author argues that under current circumstance,it is very difficult for one to raise his translation production by using a parallel corpus as a translation aid,especially for learners who tend to search the corpus too often.In addition,the experiment verifies the belief that parallel corpus can improve translation quality.