Application of parallel corpus to teaching style and translation

Abstract

This paper is a detailed account of the application of parallel corpus to the teaching of style and translation. Facilitated by corpus tools, a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of the translation of narrative markers, a key style of Chinese full-length vernacular fictions, is thoroughly demonstrated. Through the class learning, students are expected to be aware of the pseudo oral storytelling feature of Chinese vernacular fictions and understand that narrative markers, as crucial narrative devices ensuring the cohesion and coherence of the text and more importantly, reflecting the style of the genre, require proper rendition in translation. It concludes that the introduction of parallel corpus to Style and Translation class obtains positive effects. On the one hand, parallel corpus provides abundant authentic bilingual data for observation; on the other hand, convenient searching tools help sort out the desired data in an accurate and swift manner, thus facilitate class demonstration and discussion.