A Report On The Translation Of Western Area Health Initiative Documents

Many translation theories, i.e. domestication and foreignization, reception aesthetics and functional equivalence, can guide translation practice on the macro level. However, they are of little use as for the wording, word collocation and error detection in translation, which, in fact, can almost decide the quality of translation texts. With the appearance of modern corpus, which is a large collection of authentically occurring texts, this problem can be solved with corpus’marvelous search function. On July18,2012, the Western Area Health Initiative was launched which is a collaboration effort initiated by the Ministry of Health of China and the World Health Organization. The Initiative aims to improve the health of numerous people in the western part of China, and Shaanxi Province, Chongqing Municipality, and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have been selected as pilot regions. The author of this report shouldered some of Chinese-English translation tasks generated from the Initiative and used Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in the process of translation. Based on this translation practice under the enlightenment of the error detection function of corpus, in this report, the author will first give a brief introduction of task background in Chapter One, and then describe corpus, COCA and its error detection function in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, the author will explicate the application of error detection of COCA during this translation practice and give examples. The conclusion is in Chapter Four.