| Xinjiang's foreign publicity plays a significant role in its economic development and social stability. Whether the publicity is effective or not largely depends on the quality of the English translation of publicity material, which is one of the weakest parts of Xinjiang foreign publicity at present. It is high time for it to be excelled. Up until now, however, there have been very few studies on this domain.Meanwhile, with the development of computer technology, the corpus-based translation study– as a new branch of translation studies– is developing rapidly. Specialized parallel corpus, which has a large capacity and which can quickly be updated, plays an unmatchable role in translation practice and study. Plus, in recent years, methods and computer software for building parallel corpus have been developed; and some large bilingual parallel corpora have been constructed and put into use. Still, they are of little help to the translation of Xinjiang publicity material.Therefore, the author proposes in this paper to construct a Chinese-English parallel corpus of publicity material with Xinjiang characteristics for translators and explores its applications. Hence, this paper will mainly answer the following two questions:1) How should the corpus be designed and constructed?2) What role can the specialized parallel corpus play in the translation of Xinjiang publicity material?Based on the experiences from do-it-yourself corpus in China, a specialized parallel corpus of about 100,000 words has been built. All material involved was collected from Xinjiang official publicity websites, published publicity books, and publicity documents from the government. The construction procedures included overall design, material collection and preprocessing, material transfer, sentence alignment and concordance system construction.In order to find out what role the corpus can play in the translation of Xinjiang publicity material, a translation test experiment and a questionnaire survey were conducted in this research. Through qualitative and quantitative study on the experiment results and detailed analysis of the data got from the questionnaire survey, conclusions are drawn as follows:1)The corpus can help to improve translators' translation efficiency and better their translation quality when they translate Xinjiang publicity material. Its usefulness is especially obvious in aiding their translation of proper nouns, terms and other fixed expressions.2) The corpus can not only help translators to obtain greater consistency in the translation of proper nouns, terms, and other fixed expressions, but also help them to reduce repetitious work and time consumption when they cooperate to do a translation task.3) The corpus can provide students with evidence of how master translators overcome difficulties of translation in practice and enable them to learn their strategies, and thusly develop their own ideas of how to deal with certain translation problems. Therefore, it can be used for translator's training as well.4) A useful tool as it is, the corpus is not omnipotent. Whether a translator can use the corpus effectively depends largely on his own translation competence. Meanwhile, the translation of Xinjiang publicity material is closely related to culture and it is thus relatively flexible, which requires translators to give full play to their creative thinking in translation while using the corpus for reference instead of copying or imitating the translations in the corpus mechanically. Otherwise, their creativity in translation will be repressed.This paper is an application study. It primarily explores specialized parallel corpus in the translation of Xinjiang publicity materials and tests a new method to enhance translators' performance of translating Xinjiang publicity material and to improve the quality of the translation of Xinjiang publicity material. |
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