On The Chinese-Korean Translation Of Technical Terms Through A Pivot Language:An Internet-aided Approach

The knowledge transfer across languages within technical field is inseparable from technical translation.As technical texts contain many technical terms designating the concepts and knowledge in a certain technical field,the translation of technical terms plays an essential role in technical communication.Thanks to the development of information technology,terminology mining via Internet is becoming a trend and its potential effectiveness for technical term translation has been justified by researchers to some extent.However,previous studies on Internet-aided translation of technical terminology have some limitations.Firstly,the evaluation of Internet-aided approach for technical term translation generally concerns linguistic dimension,lacking depth in conceptual analysis.Secondly,most related studies are heavily focused on language pairs of rich language resources online,such as English-Chinese and English-French,while little attention has been drawn to technical term translation between language pairs lacking in language resources-such as Chinese and Korean-to which the existing Internet-aided approach is not fully applicable.Based on the status quo of Chinese-Korean technical term translation and the author's personal experience,the present study,using English as a pivot language,proposes an Internet-aided approach to address the issue of translating technical terms between poor-resourced language pairs like Chinese and Korean.That is,extracting the English equivalents of Chinese technical terms first,and acquiring Korean equivalents using English equivalents as queries.The method proposed by the present study combines Internet and pivot languages.Its rationale and merits for technical term translation between poor-resourced languages are analyzed from the perspective of concept transmission.In the next part,feasibility of the Internet-aided and English-pivoted approach for Chinese-Korean technical term translation is discussed.This consists of two aspects.Firstly,the interaction among Chinese,Korean and English in the field of science is explored based on the statistics of UNESCO Index Translationum.Secondly,the availability of rich Chinese-English and Korean-English resources online is justified by observing online condition for each language.In the end,a hands-on procedure of this method is proposed with the illustration of some practical cases.After a detailed discussion on technical terminology,pivot languages and Internet-aided translation,it is concluded that the English-pivoted and Internet-aided method is significantly helpful to the technical term translation between Chinese and Korean.On the one hand,this method can effectively solve problems concerning the imbalanced term resources between different language pairs.On the other hand,the accuracy of translation is ensured by conducting quantitative and qualitative evaluation using search engines,with the idea of utilizing the Web as a large-scale corpus.The present study provides a practical solution to the technical term translation between poor-resourced language pairs.The idea of evaluating a term translation method from the perspective of concept transmission has a methodological value for term translation studies.Furthermore,a replicable working procedure is given,which hopefully may help technical term translation between other poor-resourced language pairs.