2011 9 25-53

Sketch EngineSKE

NTU Chinese-English Parallel Corpora

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t MI

2011 11 5 2011 7 9 2011 7 11

E-mail: FB061@mail.oit.tw

Compilation and Translation Review

Vol. 4, No. 2 (September 2011), 25-53

Corpus-Based Analysis for English-Chinese Translation of Passives in VOA News

Chien-hui Hung
When translating English into Chinese, translators are often unconsciously influenced by English syntax, which often results in the westernization of translated Chinese. This study addresses this issue by employing
scientific methods to look at the English-Chinese translation of passives in
Voice of America News. Based on the Sketch Engine Traditional Chinese
Corpus and the NTU Chinese-English Parallel Corpora, we examine
the quantitative characteristics of westernized Chinese in terms of word
frequency and two statistical measures for collocationsMutual Information and t score. Corpus tools such as concordance and word sketch
in Sketch Engine were employed to observe and analyze collocation patterns in authentic Chinese. The goal is to help translators avoid using nonidiomatic and inauthentic Chinese and to advocate the use of both monolingual and bilingual corpora as important resources for improving the
quality of translation, as well as the use of statistics to present the norm of
the language in translation studies.
Keywords: CTS, passive construction, corpus, word frequency, collocability, norm
Received: November 5, 2010; Revised: July 9, 2011; Accepted: July 11,
2011

Chien-hui Hung, Assistant Professor, General Education Center, Oriental Institute of

Technology, E-mail: FB061@mail.oit.edu.tw

 27

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 29

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30

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32

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 33

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34

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 35

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36

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 37

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40

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 41

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42

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1. NTU Chinese-English Parallel Corpora

2. translationese Nida1959
3.

2005
4. 1995

5.

2002 61
6. 2006 224
7. Selinker1972interlanguageIL
8. A corpus is a principled collection of texts. A corpus
is a collection of electronic texts usually stored on a computer. A corpus is available for
qualitative and quantitative analysisOkeeffe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007, p. 1-2
9. simplificationexplicitation
normalisation/conservatismlevelling out
2005
10. Hatim normThe conventions (in the sense of
implicitly agreed-upon standards) of acceptable content and rhetorical organization (2001,
p. 231)

 47

11. Second
Language Acquisition, SLAForeign Language Teaching, FLT
Computer Learner Corpus, CLC

Granger, 2004
12.
13. http://www.voafanti.com/gate/big5/www.voanews.com/chinese/
14.
15. http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/
16. SKE SKE SKE

17.
18.Chi-squaredX2Test
Chi-squared L L Chi-squared Test
Rayson, Berridge, & Francis, 2004 LL

19. 2002 155

20. Z Hunston, 2002Z t

21. NTU Chinese-English Parallel Corpora

22. 2005n-gram
23.
24.

2009
406-416
2002
2005

1995
1990

48

2001
2003
1993
1993

1997
2005
9161-196
2004
133-144
2000
2001
2006

2007
C. N. Li & S. A. Thompson

2002
20103
2163-202
1997
1997
8.1- 8.10
2005 9 405426
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NTU Chinese-English Parallel Corpora

NTU Chinese-English Parallel CorporaVOA:

52

Sketch Engine (SKE)

SKEConcordance

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SKEWord Sketch

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