Specialized Parallel Corpus In Enhancing Cadets' Competencies In Military Translation

Military translation, as a subfield of technical translation, is gaining more and more importance in the Information Age (胡志敏, 1994). Some of the previous studies put their focus on the stylistic features of military translation (胡志敏, 1994). Some gave general guidelines, for instance, terminology unification and perfect expression in military Chinese (周大军, 2006;宋春晖, 2001;韩子满, 2001). Some analyzed the reasons of mistranslations in military translation, and came to the conclusion that military translators should have the basic competencies of subject-field understanding, foreign-language competence, etc. (雍春生,何红, 2005). And there have been few studies concentrating on how to enhance the competencies of military translation.On the other hand, although corpus-based translation studies have been explored for years, their advantages have not been exploited much. Previous studies showed that different categories of corpora had different effects upon translation studies, including specialized corpus which can facilitate subject-field understanding (Kennedy, 2000; Austermühl, 2006), and parallel corpus which can juxtapose original texts and translations (Bernardini, Stewart & Zanettin, 2003; Maia, 2003). And together with the development of corpus-based translation studies, the unique effects of specialized and parallel corpus upon translation studies become increasingly remarkable.Based on the previous studies, this thesis tries to bring corpus into the field of military translation, and to explore the effects the specialized parallel corpus can exert on cadets'translation competencies. Translation competencies consist of foreign-language competence, subject-field understanding and native-language competence. Foreign-language competence refers to the competence to understand words and grammar in foreign language. Subject-field understanding refers to the competence to understand the background information. Native-language competence refers to competence to express oneself in target language. This thesis will provide answers to the following research questions:1. Can the specialized parallel corpus help translators to accelerate their translation speed in military translation? If so, to what degree can it be helpful?2. Can the specialized parallel corpus help translators to better their foreign-language competence in military translation? If so, to what degree can it be helpful?3. Can the specialized parallel corpus help translators to better their subject-field understanding in military translation? If so, to what degree can it be helpful?4. Can the specialized parallel corpus help translators to better their native-language competence in military translation? If so, to what degree can it be helpful?5. What do the translators who take part in the experiment think of the specialized parallel corpus?Yet, currently there has been no such specialized parallel corpus of military translation materials. Therefore, based on the experiences from DIY corpus (赵宏展, 2007;蒋林,金兵, 2007;王克非, 2004,黄俊红,黄萍,范云, 2004;倪传斌,刘治, 2005;谢家成, 2007), a specialized parallel corpus of about 400,000 words has been built up. All materials involved concentrated on a specific military field. And ICTCLAS software was used to parse the Chinese materials. The corpus built was aligned at sentence's level. And the analyzing tool is Paraconc (Barlow, 1996).The experiment was borrowed mainly from three works of Bowker (1998), May & Xu, (2002), and Wei Yaoyu et al. (2006). However, some improvements were made. The subjects of the experiment were 24 junior cadets of English majors in a military university. A pre-test and a post-test were arranged before and after an introduction to this corpus. The results were compared and analyzed in different ways. Finally, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was introduced to present the statistical significance of the results. It is found that the specialized parallel corpus can help the cadets in the following aspects:1. Accelerating their translation speed in military translation. The cadets used less time in finishing the second text's translation, despite that they were not quite familiar with the concordance tool.2. Enhancing their foreign-language competence. Independent Samples T-Test found the results not significant (p = 0.369, 0.212).3. Enhancing their subject-field understanding. Independent Samples T-Test found the results significant (p = 0.011, 0.016).4. Enhancing their native-language competence. Independent Samples T-Test found the results not significant (p = 0.46, 0.116).5. Out of 24 cadets, 18 cadets handed in their comments. Nearly all of these 18 cadets found the corpus helpful. The corpus could provide more detailed military knowledge, thus it could help them to understand the source text better. The corpus had the authoritative expressions of military field, so it helped them to come to more accurate translations. The corpus helped them to translate the military terms, too. However, some cadets found the corpus inconvenient to use. And some of the terms can not be found in the corpus.In all, this thesis primarily explored specialized parallel corpus in military translation, testing a new method to enhance competencies of military translation. The study showed that the specialized parallel corpus built can enhance the cadets'competencies of military translation (p = 0) as well as the competence of subject-field understanding significantly. And the corpus enhanced other competencies of military translation, too. Moreover, it could be induced that with the extension of the corpus'content and the proficiency of cadets'operation in the corpus as well as its analyzing tool, this corpus could play a more important role in military translation and military translator's training.Although the competencies of languages (foreign-language and native-language) did not have a significant rise in this study, it is understandable, for there is no shortcut to enhance one's language ability in a very short period of time. But the specialized parallel corpus did better the cadets'translations in the aspect of languages. That could imply that it is feasible to apply corpus to translation teaching and training is feasible.