An Analysis on Application and development of COCA Corpus in Translation Practice

張艷霞+項芬

【Abstract 】The corpus resource has profound influence in wild range of linguistic study， especially for the study of translation. This paper will illustrate that corpus plays a great supporting role in translation teaching and COCA is a valuable corpus resource and a tool for students to conduct online autonomous learning of English vocabulary.

【Key words】corpus； translation teaching； COCA

1. Introduction

With the rapid development of computer technology， corpus is significant in many fields. For recent years， lots of scholars link the theories to practice to explore the methodology of translation studies. Mona Baker， a professor and Director of the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester in England， analyzes some reflexes of public and comments of theorist. She identifies that corpus can test the effectiveness which translation theories come about practice and will help translators improve the translation equality.

2. A Brief Introduction of Corpus

The word “corpus” stems from Latin， and its original meaning is body which means that the corpus is the warehouse of language materials. In Chinese Term in Linguistic， the definition of corpus is that language materials stored in computer and collected for language research and application and aggregated by sample of written language or spoken language.

Besides， corpus has a variety of classification. What the corpus stores are the authentic materials used in the real language context. It takes the electronic computer as a carrier to analyze and cure authentic language material. English translation corpus refers that one often recueillir the real official publications on various type which are translated into English， and counts up， compares and analyzes the linguistic phenomenon by means of the computers. As a kind of specific and detailed resource， it can help researchers to verify whether the theoretical nature of translation is effective and the translation method is feasible in practice.

3. The Application of Corpus in the Translation Teaching

The rapid development in computer and network technology creates new conditions for translation teaching. The introduction of online corpus in teaching will enrich the methods of translation teaching to a great extent. COCA—Corpus of Contemporary American English is the latest contemporary English corpus in American， and also the largest balanced English corpus all over the world.endprint

3.1 The Application of COCA in the translation teaching

3.1.1 learning the collocation and enriching semantic and style of words

Lets take the word—“Face” as an example， this word has a great number of meanings. Through inquiring in the COCA， the collocation of it in different meaning or different context is presented vividly in chart1.

For all we known， language learners make some mistakes when using pragmatic vocabulary in practical application. The major reason is that they in the learning process input passively undue canonical language from dictionaries and teaching materials， and less contact the real use environment of language. COCA corpus is compiled from native English speakers and integrates with more than 60000 kinds of data. The query function helps learners to solve the problem vocabulary mistakes and problems in translation and writing.

3.1.2 finding out the synonyms of words

When Inputting the character string [=look] in the input box of COCA， the synonym of look will be present as chart2. The synonym is arranged on the base of frequency of occurrence in the corpus.

3.2 The function and significant of COCA in translation teaching

COCA corpus support online download， containing a wide range of linguistic data and providing informative and accurate language paradigms for translation teaching. Because COCA corpus is completely free and open to all， teachers thus can let students themselves find related corpus resources and strengthen the skills practice. Professional classification of corpus provides linguistic materials for translation teaching. In translation teaching of modern university， the efficiency of foreign language teaching will be improved significantly to promote the application of corpus resources and research results in foreign language translation.

Conclusion

All in all， corpus is a high-efficiency teaching means of integrating information technology and English course. Except for COCA， we all know the other online corpora， such as BNC Cobuild and LDC. By virtue of rich linguistic data and efficient inquiry mode， the needs of teachers and students can be met and teaching problems can be solved.

References：

[1]Baker，M.Corpora in Translation Studies：an Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research[J].Target，1995，7（2）：228.

[2]YU Guoliang.Applications of Corpus in Translation Studies.Foreign Language and Literature.2010，26（2）：117-121.endprint