A Corpus-based Translation Study Of Synonyms In The Patent Documents

In the practice of translating patent documents,the translators are usually bothered by the correspondence between English synonyms and their Chinese counterparts.As the specification of the language in patent documents is very rigorous,the translation of synonyms in patent documents is a very thorny issue to be reckoned with.In this thesis,the author selects two typical sets of English and Chinese synonyms:“comprise”,“include”,“contain”,“consist of”and包括,包含,含有and由…组成;“illustrate”,“represent”,“display”and“show”and示出,显示,表示and所示.The author uses corpus concordance to find the correspondence between the English synonyms and their Chinese counterparts.The results can provide translation suggestion to related synonyms.Comparable corpora were built of 100 pairs of English patent documents and Chinese ones both belonging to the same patent family and divided into four sub-corpora of different fields of research.With the help of AntConc,the frequency of target words in the four subcorpora is collected for correlation analysis and ranking of translation correspondences.Then the online parallel corpus of Wipleader is used to collect the frequency of translation equivalents of the target words and ranks the translations equivalents accordingly.Combining the results of correlation coefficients and translation frequency ranking,the correspondence between English synonyms and Chinese ones are recommended as follows:“comprise”,“include”,“contain”and“consist of”are respectively corresponding to包括or包含,包括,含有and由…组成;“illustrate”,“represent”,“display”and“show”corresponding to示出or所示,表示,显示and示出or显示;包括,包含,含有and由…组成are corresponding to“comprise”or“include”,“comprise”,“contain”and“consist of”;示出,表示,显示and所示corresponding to“illustrate”,“represent”,“display”and“illustrate”.Comparison of the results from the comparable corpora and parallel corpus shows that they share high similarity,exhibiting the results of analysis of correlation of synonyms in comparable corpora may provide the translation recommendation index for the machine translation of patent documents.