OntheapplicationofcorpusinChinese—Englishtranslations.docVIP

OntheapplicationofcorpusinChinese—Englishtranslations 　　Abstract： In translating from Chinese to English， we Chinese tend to rely on dictionaries or sometimes simply intuition to choose lexes. However， the translated texts still read not that idiomatic as the native speakers，the basic reason lying in the inappropriate collocations. Fortunately， the discovery of corpus laid the quantized basis for the study of collocational behaviors. This article aims to discuss the functions of corpus in bettering C-E translations. 　　Key word： Corpus； C-E translation； Collocation； Semantic prosody 　　1.Introduction 　　The process of translating is to transfer the expressions in source language into target language. The criteria of “faithfulness， expressiveness and elegancy” proposed by the great master in translation， Yanfu， has long been advocated in the translating world.However，it is in no way easy to reach these criteria， for translating is not only an interlanguage activity but also a trans-cultural one. As far as Chinese and English languages are concerned，it differs a lot in terms of phonetics， syntax and context；while the two nations have great differences in values，social systems，religious belief， so and so forth.The reflection of diversities in cultures on languages hinders the translatability between two languages.So the mistakes translators make are usually not grammatical，but collocational.With regard to this problem， this article focuses on how to apply corpus researches and findings in translating work to produce accurate and appropriate translated texts. 　　2.Corpus 　　Corpus is a collection of texts in an electronic database， collected according to certain linguistic principles and with the method of random sampling.Corpus，by its character and function， is usually categorized into five patterns as follows： common corpus； specialized corpus； spoken corpus； parallel corpus.The evolution of corpus has experienced several stages， from manual corpus stage to computeriz