An Empirical Study Of Translation Teaching For English Majors Based On Parallel Corpora And BNC

Corpus, as an advanced information retrieval tool, plays an important role inlanguage teaching and learning. There is little application of corpus into languageteaching, even with regard to translation teaching and leaning. In this thesis, theresearcher makes an attempt at examining whether student translators can overcometranslation problems when they are doing translation exercises by the aid of parallelcorpora and BNC.The thesis is mainly made up of three parts. In the first section, the researcherintroduces the purpose and significance of this study. In the second part, the currentsituation of this field both at home and abroad is described. The theories ofcorpus-based English teaching, such as constructivist learning theory, reciprocallearning theory and data driven learning theory are reviewed, which give grounds forthis study. Meanwhile, the introduction to parallel corpus and translation teaching isprovided, and furthermore the previous study of corpus-based English teaching is alsodescribed. The third part is the main body of this thesis, an experiment which is aboutwhether corpus can help student solve translation problems and improve theirtranslation level is carried out. The researcher then introduces to the subjects thecorpora which can be used in this study, such as Chinese-English Parallel Corporacreated by The National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, BFSU andBNC. The subjects are80juniors, whose major are English. They are divided into twogroups, the control class and the experimental class. The student translators in the experimental class use parallel corpora and BNC to do the translation exercises, whilethe students in the control group can do these by the aid of conventional paperdictionaries and electronic dictionaries. The material the researcher chooses is fromTEM8(2000). Then the researcher makes an analysis of the data and results oftranslation products from student translators.At last, the researcher draws a conclusion that corpus-based translation teachingcan help students choose the correct collocations, and provide student translators withthe appropriate expressions to realize the functional equivalence. It can also helpstudent translators reduce the problem of word stuffing.