Construction And Application Of The Confucian Classics Parallel Corpus

With the rising comprehensive national strength, China comes to focus on thedevelopment of its soft power. In2010, the National Social Science Fund set up aproject called Chinese Academic Translation to go along with the national strategy, i.e.promoting Chinese culture to go out. The Analects, as the representative of theConfucian classics, its English translation version has been playing a major role inhighlighting Chinese traditional culture and quintessential thought during China‘sinternational communications.Qilu Culture Research Center of Shandong Normal University was established in1999and it has published eleven monograph books entitled Qilu Cultural Studies,whose contents are all research achievements conducted by scholars at home andabroad on Qilu culture. Library of Chinese Classics (Dazhonghua Wenku,大中华文库) is an important national publishing project, which is also the first time for Chinato introduce foreign language versions of Chinese cultural classics to the worldsystematically. Thus, the expressions of culture-loaded words in the bilingual Libraryof Chinese Classics are highly authoritative and instructive. The author will use theCAT software Snowman to align the original materials in ancient Chinese with thecorresponding English translation of three of the Confucian classics compiled by theLibrary of Chinese Classics project–The Analects, Mencius and Xunzi, then build aparallel corpus to help translate a paper selected from the Qilu Cultural Studies Vol.4by applying state-of-the-art computer-aided translation (CAT) technology andcorpus-based translation technology. By doing so, this paper will explore the impactof parallel corpus on the improvement of efficiency and quality of Confucian classicstranslation with statistics and examples, and further make a preliminary feasibilityresearch for the construction of Chinese Culture Translation Core Repository andmeanwhile provide better resources for Chinese culture translation. Thick Translationis a translation method applied mainly in translating culture-loaded texts. Therefore,on the basis of the development of a Confucian classics parallel corpus, some typicalexamples will be cited from the author‘s translation to illustrate the translatability ofcultural background and culture-loaded terms, and the practical application of ThickTranslation in Chinese classics translation.Translation researches that combine CAT technology with the subject matter of Chinese culture is quite rare, with not many precedent cases being described orreported at home and abroad. This paper indicates that the development andapplication of the Confucian classics parallel corpus in translating Chineseculture-loaded classics is of groundbreaking significance to promote China‘s softpower and improve Qilu culture‘s academic standing in the world cultural studies.