Chinese-English Parallel Corpus Research Articles

“There are many ways to translate it”

The study is motivated by Mona Baker’s (1992) observation that it is almost impossible to find a grammatical category which can be expressed uniformly and regularly across languages. The aim of the present study is to verify Baker’s claim by investigating existential sentences from an English-Chinese contrastive perspective. The data was taken from the Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus, which is part-of-speech tagged and aligned at sentence level. Variation in the verbs used in English and Chinese existential clauses is discussed, and patterns of notional subjects (i.e. the noun phrase following the existential verb) and how they are translated are considered. The paper also looks into the applicability of Halliday’s theme-rheme approach to studying Chinese existentials and proposes that the topic-prominence analysis offers a more cogent account for the findings reported here.

Word Alignment in English-Chinese Parallel Corpora

Word alignment in bilingual or multilingual parallel corpora has been a challenging issue for natural language engineering. An efficient algorithm for automatically aligning word translation equivalents across different languages will be of use for a number of practical applications such as multilingual lexical construction, machine translation, etc. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm for English–Chinese word alignment, which incorporates co‐occurrence association measures, word distribution distances, English word lemmatization, and part‐of‐speech information. Eleven co‐occurrence association coefficients and eight distance measures of word distribution are explored to compare their efficiency for word alignment. The paper also describes an experiment in which the algorithm is evaluated on sentence‐aligned English–Chinese parallel corpora. In the experiment, the algorithm produced encouraging success rates on two test corpora, with the highest success rate of 89.37 per cent. It provides a practical tool for extracting word translation equivalents from English–Chinese parallel corpora.

Domains, text types, aspect marking and English-Chinese translation

This paper uses an English-Chinese parallel corpus, an L1 Chinese comparable corpus, and an L1 Chinese reference corpus to examine how aspectual meanings in English are translated into Chinese and explore the effects of domains, text types and translation on aspect marking. We will show that while English and Chinese both mark aspect grammatically, the aspect system in the two languages differs considerably. Even though Chinese, as an aspect language, is rich in aspect markers, covert marking (LVM) is a frequent and important strategy in Chinese discourse. The distribution of aspect markers varies significantly across domain and text type. The study also sheds new light on the translation effect by contrasting aspect marking in translated Chinese texts and L1 Chinese texts.