The Application Of Self-built Parallel Corpus To Assisting Translation Teaching

With the thriving of corpus-based translation, the discussion of corpus and translationteaching has been carried out abroad for years; however, similar studies in China,especially the integration of theory research and empirical study, are still limited. Moreover,with the development of computer technology and the increasing demands of efficientmilitary translators who meet the needs of the wars in conditions of informationization,combining a specialized corpus (military corpus) with translation teaching in militarycolleges has become an urgent need.Currently, the advantages of corpus-based translation teaching can be concluded asfollows: firstly, use corpus as a data resource. Corpus can assist the formation of teachingcontent and provide abundant teaching samples to translation practice with its rich andlatest language resource. Secondly, use corpus as a research method. The analysis based oncorpus is more scientific and visualized with objective results, which can fully demonstratethe translation phenomena and make the analysis more convincing. Thirdly, use corpus aspedagogy. Corpus-based pedagogy is characterized by openness and flexibility, which canenhance the interaction between teachers and students in class, and incite the interests ofstudents to form an exploratory learning model. Such pedagogy contributes to realize thestudent-centric teaching atmosphere. Fourthly, corpus-based translation teaching isbeneficial to the improvement of teaching quality and translator cultivation with its variousteaching patterns (马葳，陈清贵，范波，2010:81).On the basis of theoretical research, some of the previous researches have touchedupon the field of the integration of corpus and translation teaching with empirical evidence,but the similar study in military field is rare.It has been proved that the ultimate goal of translation teaching is to enhancetranslation competence of translators (苗菊,2007:47); Therefore, how to combine thespecialized parallel corpus with our military translation teaching to improve the translationcompetence of cadets has become a pressing question that needs to be answered. However,the former researches have rarely focused on the specific effect of corpus-based militarytranslation teaching and the development of cadets‘translation competence.Based on the fact and limitations mentioned above, this research mainly contains two parts to complete its research goal. The first one is theoretical reasoning, containing thecurrent situation of corpus-based translation teaching in home and abroad, the importanceof corpus-based translation in military translation, and the components and developmentprocess of translation competence. The second part involves an empirical study whichemploys the pattern of translation competence components built by scholars of PACTE(Process in the Acquisition of Translation Competence and Evaluation) and a small scalecorpus to probe into the usefulness and feasibility of corpus-based military translationteaching. This paper is supposed to answer the following questions:1) What is the effect of the specialized parallel corpus being introduced into theclassroom of military translation teaching?2) On the basis of the first question, if the effect is positive, can the translationcompetence of cadets be improved? If so, how the six sub-factors of translationcompetence are affected?3) How to carry out the translation-competence oriented military translationteaching under the assist of specialized parallel corpus?The empirical study part is based on the resource of a self-built specialized parallelcorpus (麻丽莉,2008) and other corpora available on the internet. The participants of thestudy are25third-year cadets of English major. The subjects of this experiment are dividedinto an uncontrolled part and a controlled one, with the former completing the translationof an assigned text using conventional resources and the latter using the corpus as areference.After the experiment, the data have been carefully collected and a thorough analysishas been done in Chapter4. In accordance with the specific requirements of thesub-competences of PACTE pattern (bilingual subcompetence, extra-linguisticsubcompetence, knowledge about translation subcompetence, professional instrumentalsubcompetence, strategic subcompetence and psycho-physiological components)(PACTE,2003:58-59) and the types of errors made by the cadets, as well as the integration andconsideration of the former researches (Bowker，1998；Sykes，1989;麻丽莉,2009), theanalysis is mainly carried out from the following three aspects: the competence of cadets‘ subject-field understanding, foreign-language competence and native-languagecompetence, and the Paired Samples T-Test is also carried out accordingly to reveal thestatistical importance of the data. Then the questions raised in Chapter2are answered by afurther discussion on the basis of the experiment data and analysis in Chapter Five. Somecomments and suggestions of the author of this thesis can be summarized as follows:From the aspect of the cadets, they were doing better with the assist of the corpus; andthe specialized corpus can provide help in their translation work by enhancing theirsubject-field understanding, foreign-language competence and native-languagecompetence, which have been highly emphasized by bilingual subcompetence andextra-linguistic subcompetence—the basic elements of translation competence. Byadopting a better strategy in their military translation under the help of the corpus, thetranslation duration of the cadets‘is shortened compared with the un-controlled part, whichis a positive effect to the development of cadets‘strategic subcompetence, the function ofwhich is to ensure the efficiency of translation process and the specific knowledge on howto resolve problems in translation. It has also been shown in the analysis that theprofessional instrumental subcompetence and psycho-physiological components of thecadets are comparatively improved.From these ample and strong evidences, this thesis concludes that such kind ofspecialized parallel corpus is worth being introduced and employed in military translationin the second development stages of cadets‘translation competence.On the foundation of the above discussion and Wen Jun‘s research result in2004, thisthesis makes some proposals on how to carry out translation-competence oriented militarytranslation teaching with the assistance of specialized parallel corpus on the considerationsof the following factors: the urgent needs of military communication and competition, thegoal to improve cadets‘military translation competence, the specific teaching content withcorpora in different military branches, the teaching measures with the integration ofgeneral teaching and specific training under the help of specialized parallel corpus in thesecond development stage of cadets‘translation competence.