Construction Of The Chinese-english Parallel Corpus Based On Lun Yu And Its Translation Teaching Practice

The translation of Chinese classics plays an important role in spreading Chinesetraditional culture, promoting Chinese cultural soft power and achieving the nationalstrategy of “culture-going-out”. Spreading Chinese culture to the West, Lun Yu (TheAnalects or The Analects of Confucius) cannot be neglected, which is one of the mostfamous books of Confucianism and which shows political views, ethnic philosophy,moral thoughts and teaching principles of Kong Zi (Confucius), all of which haveimmense influence on Chinese thoughts and cultures. From the end of the17thcenturytill now, different versions of Lun Yu have been translated by foreign missionaries,foreign sinologists, overseas Chinese sinologists, domestic scholars and many otherpeople. However, among all the studies, there is no study using the way of corpus. If thecorpus based on Lun Yu is constructed, the study of Lun Yu will be developed by thefunctions of corpus.Bilingual parallel corpus, which provides a tool to search between the original textsand their translation texts and reveal their equivalence relationships, is used in areassuch as translation versions study, translation versions comparing study, translationuniversal study and translation teaching. There is a great demand of constructionbilingual parallel corpus in special areas by scholars themselves, for one reason thatmost scholars do not have the copyright to use some large bilingual parallel corpora andfor another reason that most corpora are general corpora which cannot offer specificinformation in different areas for studies. In translation teaching and training, there is atrend to apply some new skills and technologies. If the bilingual parallel corpus basedon Lun Yu is successfully compiled, it will not only set example for the construction ofChinese classics corpus but also offer a new method in Chinese classics translationteaching.This dissertation attempts to exemplify the creation of the Chinese-English parallelcorpus of Lun Yu based on four English versions to explore corpus designing, selecting,aligning, tagging and concordancing, aiming to offer an effective approach to theChinese classics translation teaching and improving English major students’ translationcompetence of Chinese classics. There are two main parts in this dissertation. The firstpart introduces the construction of corpus by the software of Yaxin CATv4.0(Computer Aided Translation). After the corpus is compiled, the concept words and sentences ofLun Yu can be searched for translation teaching. The second part is a case study whichresearches on whether this corpus is effective or not in improving the students’translation abilities after using it in the English translation teaching class. The subjectsof this study are a group of34third-year English major’s students from School ofForeign Languages and Cultures in Southwest University of Science and Technology.Two questionnaires (Pre-test questionnaire and After-test questionnaire) are adopted tocollect the point of views on corpus-based translation and the effect of this corpus fromthe students. Two tests (Test A and Test B) are used to test the effect of the corpus-basedtranslation teaching from the analyzing the scores. Two students’ answering papers (TestA paper and Test B paper) will be analyzed to show their improvement of translationabilities after the corpus-based translation teaching. On the basis of data, the C-Eparallel corpus of Lun Yu can help translators improving the quality of Lun Yu’s Englishtranslation.