Abstract
1. Theoretical Background and Existing Research:
Laursen and Pellón (2012: 45) pointed out that specialist translation training aims to teach trainees how to manage a host of encyclopaedic and linguistic data adequately for professional translation. This forms a challenge for student trainees. Bernardini and Ferraresi (2013) proposed that comparable corpora are particularly relevant in scientific and technical translations. The use of comparable corpora in assisting specialist translation training has been explored by Symseridou (2018), Kübler and Aston (2010), Zanettin (1998), etc.
2. Methodology
In this research, 16 Chinese MA Translation students were required to translate a medical text focusing on treatment of H.pylori from English to Chinese. Students were trained to use WebBootCat toolkit (Baroni et al., 2006) to build comparable corpora and the collocation and concordance tools provided by Sketch Engine to assist their translation.
The seed words used to build the comparable corpora (Kilgarriff et al., 2011: 2) are:
English seed words
(discussed and selected from ST) Chinese seed words
(equivalents of English ones)
H.pylori “perforated peptic ulcer” endoscopy clipping injection 幽门螺旋杆菌 (H.pylori), 消化性溃疡穿孔 (perforated peptic ulcer), 胃镜 (endoscopy) 钛夹 (clipping) 注射 (injection)
Table 1: seed words for building comparable corpora on treatment of H.pyloi
3. Discussions
4.1 From terminological level
Students found the translation of endoscopic clipping challenging, as it can mean either cutting off or using clippers, e.g. to stop bleeding. A search of endoscopic clipping in the English subcorpus reveals its meaning:
Figure 1: Concordance lines of endoscopic clipping in English subcorpus
The above lines confirm the meaning of clipping as using clips to stop bleeding, but the Chinese literal translation内镜钛夹 (endoscopic clipping) does not occur in the Chinese subcorpus Instead, when setting 内镜 (endoscopic) as a word occurring within left and right 5 positions of钛夹 (clipping), the following concordances are generated:
Figure 2: Concordance lines of 内镜 (endoscopic) and钛夹 (clipping) in Chinese subcorpus
The translation that is more frequently used in Chinese medical context is: 内镜下钛架 (literal translation: clippers used under endoscope).
3.2 From collocational level
The translation of motility disorder forms a challenge from collocational level. 动力 is an acceptable translation of motility, but students use different words for disorder: 障碍 (barriers), 问题 (problem) 受阻 (being prevented), etc. A search of 动力 (motility) in Chinese subcorpus provides an ideal solution: 紊乱 (wenluan, indicating a state of being disordered, typically used in medical field).
3.3 From the level of stylistic conventions
Students show their understanding of text conventions of the genre of medical texts that vary across English and Chinese by using corpora. Through comparative analyses of search words in respective contexts and post-translation activities, students’ revised translations are more adhered to the target communicative context and textual constraints.
4. Limitations
This study does not take bilingual term recognition system into consideration, which is an important area to be investigated, as shown in the work of Vintar (2010), Ren, et. al (2010). Besides, the grammatical level of specialised text is not included.