A Preliminary Study Of Corpus-based Translation Teaching

With the development of computer technology, electronic corpus is created. By now, it has a history about a century, especially as a tool for linguistic study. However, it is still new in applied linguistics, particularly in foreign language teaching. Consequently, corpus-based language teaching has been considered as one important study field in foreign language teaching including vocabulary, grammar, writing teaching and error analysis. In recent years, researchers find out that corpora are of help to teachers who teach translation for enhancing students'translating capabilities and raise their language awareness. Since the current translation class for Chinese undergraduates has some problems, it can be perfected by integrating translation teaching with modern technology.Illuminated and inspired by the current research, this thesis aims at exploring on corpus-based EC/CE (English-Chinese & Chinese-English) translation teaching of Chinese undergraduates who specialize in English. First, the developmental history of corpus and concordance and their application in linguistic study and language teaching are introduced. Then current corpus-based translation teaching research all over the world is introduced. Compared with current the modes of translation teaching for Chinese undergraduates, the main applications and advantages of this pedagogy are analyzed. Then the thesis focuses on how to employ different kinds of corpora in EC/CE translation teaching by providing some sample class activities. These corpora include parallel corpora, specialized corpora, learner corpora, comparable corpora and DIY corpora. Finally, the great potential of corpus-based study is summarized, and some limitations of this research are pointed out as well that can put forward areas for further study.