The Parallel Corpus Design and the Corresponding Unit Identification
LI Wen-zhon · Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies · 2010
It has been assumed that translation is a strongly context dependent process in which the translators interact with the texts,the audience,and other translators via the previous texts.Good translations are but those that are repeatedly referred to through negotiation by the community of translators and are therefore established.It follows that the translation text currently focused is not only an end product,but a necessary link of the diachronic homogeneous texts that arrests many of the important features of the past translation practices.The corresponding units are therefore defined as any identifiable chunks of texts or segments of texts that correspond each other in TL and SL,which encapsulate the completeness and the sameness of meaning of their counterparts in a syntagmatic construction.The corresponding units may or may not be reversible as they are dynamic in their construction and specific context.The research questions are:1) How is equivalence defined theoretically and measured operationally in the parallel corpora? 2) To what extent is corpus-driven approach applicable in the parallel corpora processing? And 3) What insights could be obtained for monolingual text processing,the multiword expressions processing in Chinese in particular,from the perspectives of the bilingual texts? The research objectives are therefore to identify the corresponding units and build a CUbase that contains all the probable units.A further analysis would be on the complex equivalent relationships thus displayed in corresponding units and misrepresentation.