The Application Of English-Chinese Parallel Corpora In Translation Teaching

With the development of computer technologies, the latest several decades have witnessed the rapid growth of corpora. By using the abundant linguistic materials taken from corpora and advanced concordancing software, the corpus linguistics has opened up a new field for linguistic research and language pedagogy. Under such conditions, a corpus-based translation teaching method was proposed. It draws public attention greatly because of its characteristics of containing real language materials, making students learn by discovery and autonomously. However, in the field of translation teaching, or translator education, the conventional approach still dominates the field. Conventional translation teaching method, which is conducted in such a manner that the teacher is the dominant person in the class while students are merely passive recipients and regard translation as static knowledge and teaching as merely a transfer of that knowledge, has many inadequacies. The weaknesses of this conventional methodology are obvious and have hampered the improvement of the students'abilities. Therefore it is necessary for us to introduce the corpus-based translation teaching method in the translation class and this can remedy the weakness of conventional translation teaching method.Based on the theories of constructivism and data-driven-learning theories, this thesis introduces corpus into the field of translation teaching in order to explore the effects the parallel corpus can exert on students'translation competences. In this thesis, the translation competences refer to the competences of foreign-language, subject-field understanding, native-language, the ability of generating a series of more than one viable target text for a pertinent source text and selecting only one viable translation text from this series, quickly and confidently.This thesis consists of two parts. Firstly, it introduces corpora, reviews the relevant situation about corpus-based translation teaching, and then explains the application as well as the advantages of corpora in translation studies. The second part is mainly an empirical study of whether the corpora may help students solve some practical problems in Chinese-English translation or improve their translation competences. The subjects of this study are a group of 60 third-year English majors from Dezhou University, who are divided in to two groups according to the scores of the pre-test. Two different teaching methods, corpus-based translation method and traditional method, were respectively adopted into two groups. The pre-test and post-test, which are chosen from TEM 8 (1998), are adopted to test the effect of different teaching method on translation. Then the analysis and summaries of translation products from subjects are made. Finally, on the basis of data, the conclusion is drawn:Despite its many weaknesses, it can be a very useful tool for both teachers and students to enhance the performance and quality of translation teaching groups.