Corpus-based Translation Teaching From The Perspective Of Constructivism

Corpus is used as an assistant tool in language education,which is being a new study field in applied linguistics.Based on a large collection of authentic materials and advanced software,corpus makes an easy and quick analysis of the greatest amounts of linguistic data possible.In recent years,researchers find out that corpus can help translation teachers to enhance students' translating competence and language awareness.Corpus can provide plenty of examples and relevant information for translation teaching,and lead to changes in methodology.The traditional translation class for Chinese undergraduates who major in English can be perfected by integrating translation teaching with modern information technology.This thesis aims at exploring on corpus-based translation teaching from the perspective of constructivism and its concrete application in the translation teaching of Chinese undergraduates who major in English.With the application of parallel corpora in translation teaching and learning,an empirical study is done to test the effect of the new model.The study proves that corpus-based approach is effective in translation teaching and can contribute to autonomous translation learning at the same time.That can be shown in the following aspects.First,corpus provides a new medium for translation teaching and learning.For teachers,corpus can greatly improve the efficiency to obtain supplementary teaching materials.For students,a more active approach emphasizing discovering can make learning more engaging and less intimidating.Second,in corpus-based translation class the teacher acts as a learning expert,which can motivate students and enhance their learning efficiency.The students have more opportunities to control their own learning and their learning awareness is promoted.Third,the large amounts of data in the corpus enrich the teaching contents,and more importantly,the way the data is presented facilitates the discovery of some useful translation knowledge,such as different translation samples of words,phrases,sentences and discourses,by individual users.Last,through the process of discovering,the students developed a sense of achievement and had an impression that translation is at least"learnable". The awareness that translation can be learned by observing and testing hypothesis are developed and fostered.This thesis is only a preliminary study about the application of corpus in translation teaching and learning from the perspective of constructivism.More research should be conducted on the function of a corpus in the future.