The Application Of Self-compiled Corpus To Vocational Chinese-English Translation Teaching

Nowadays, corpus-based approach has been applied to plenty of fields oflanguage study, including second language acquisition, language teaching,comparative linguistics and many other linguistic disciplines. Since the1990s, manyresearchers at home and abroad have studied translation and translation teaching onthe basis of corpus and their research results demonstrate that corpus can greatlycontribute to translation teaching. Although there exist numerous large scale corporaboth at home and abroad, the disadvantages of high cost, data smog andinconvenience block their accessibilities to teachers and students in practicaltranslation teaching and learning.With the increase of qualities and decrease of prices of computers, theproliferation of English electronic texts and popularization of scanners in teachingfield, it is entirely possible for teachers and small teaching teams to establish smallscale corpora in accordance with their practical teaching demands. Inspired by thecurrent studies, the author attempts to build a small scale corpus that is primarilybased on the tool Antonc and apply it to vocational C-E translation teaching, aimingat exploring whether it is feasible and valid to apply self-compiled corpus totranslation teaching. Three questions are put forward based on the research: Firstly,can the application of self-compiled corpus to C-E translation teaching enhancestudents’ translation competence? Secondly, can the application of self-compiledcorpus to C-E translation teaching improve students’ translation initiatives andinterests? Thirdly, what are the students’ attitudes toward the construction of corpusand the application of self-compiled corpus to C-E translation teaching?The experiment carried out in Jinan Vocational College lasts for18weeks. In theexperiment, the self-compiled corpus was applied in experimental class while in thecontrolled class the traditional translation teaching was still adopted. The analyses ofstudents’ scores of pre-test and post-test which were carried out in both experimentalclass and controlled class showed that the mean score of students from experimentalclass was obviously higher than that from controlled class, which demonstrated in away that the application of self-compiled corpus to C-E translation teaching contributed to the improvement of students’ translation competence. In addition, pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire were distributed to students at the beginning andthe end of semester in order to investigate students’ attitudes toward translationlearning and self-compiled corpus-based translation teaching. Besides, three studentsselected randomly from experimental class were interviewed by the author at the endof experiment, aiming to further analyze students’ attitudes toward the application ofself-compiled corpus to C-E translation teaching. The results of questionnaires andinterviews showed that the application of self-compiled corpus to C-E translationteaching raised students’ translation initiatives and interests and that students exertedpositive attitudes toward the construction of corpus as well as the application of self-compiled corpus to C-E translation teaching. Based on the analyses of experimentresults, a conclusion that the application of self-compiled corpus to C-E translationteaching is feasible and valid could be achieved.At last, the author draws conclusions concerning the experiment, offers somerelated pedagogical implications and puts forward limitations of the study.