A Study On The Correspondence Between English And Chinese Phrases From The Perspective Of Co-selection Theory

With the advancement of translation technology,more and more parallel corpora are applied in machine translation and computer-assisted translation to improve translation efficiency.The performance of parallel corpus is on a great extent dependent on the quality of translation and the way of alignment.Translation is meant to realize the correspondence of meaning between cross-liguistic unit,and alignment can be regarded as an equivalence based on the correspondence between the unit of meaning.The unit of phrase plays as the most important role in conveying meanings,which makes it the unit of meaning correspondence.Words selects mutually in communication.Words and words,words and grammar,patterns and meanings or functions are always combined to achieve the purpose of communication.The theory of co-selection reveals the composition of phrase pattern and the research of its correspondence between two languages is of great significance for improving the translation and alignment auqlity of parallel corpus.Under the guidance of co-selection theory,this study is based on self-built English-Chinese parallel corpus of agricultural science and technology.BCC(Chinese Language Corps of Beijing Language and Culture University)and BNC(British National Corpus)are referred as comparable corpus.This study uses the Extended Units of Meaning as research model to investigate the features of pattern composition of both English and Chinese phrases and to analyze the correspondence between their components.According to the study of correspondence between English and Chinese phrases,there are the following summeries:English and Chinese phrases are quite different in pattern composition as they show different features in components;Partial correspondence instead of Full correspondence of colligation is widely observed between English and Chinese phrases.One-to-one correspondenceof semantic preference is not commonly found between English and Chinese phrases while they always share the same semantic prosody;In addition,various types of colligation are found in English and Chinese text of science and technology.Phrases in this kind of text show strong objectivity in collocation and high rate of correspondence between the two languages.The majority of them has neutral semantic prosody thus express few attitudes and feelings.The study on the correspondence between phrases lays the theoretical foundation for automatic professional common wordsextraction and phrase-level alignment in parallel corpus,enlighting and guiding to construct alignment model.