《on the issue of representation of corpus translation studies》.pdf

Feb. 2009, Volume 6, No.2 (Serial No.62) Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN 1539-8072, USA On the issue of representation in Corpus Translation Studies JIANG Lin (School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China) Abstract: Corpus Translation Studies (CTS) is a new field in translation studies and the representation of corpus is quite an important issue that deserves attention. At present, the translation theoretical circle holds different views on translation corpora and internal structures. Indeed, the existing translation theories can hardly be applied to CTS. As such, CTS can only make further development after the problem of corpora representation is solved. Key words: corpus-based translation studies; corpora; representation 1. Introduction Translation studies are inter-disciplinary, involving no less than 20 disciplines. It is closely related to linguistics. The linguistic school in translation studies started and prospered from 1950s to 1970s, and later was transcended by the cultural school. Till the 1990s, however, linguistics has been making further development due to the emergence of corpus translation studies. Then what is corpus? The dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (Crystal, 2003, p. 10) defines it as “a collection of language material which may be not just written texts, but also recorded scripts”. It can be either used to describe languages or to validate linguistic hypothesis. If applied in translation studies, CTS refers to translational corpora including both spoken texts and written texts. As far as the author is concerned, the representation of collected cor