Chapter published in:
Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations
Edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
[Benjamins Translation Library 158] 2021
► pp. 49–74

Chapter 2
ZHEN

A directional parallel corpus of Chinese source texts and English translations

| Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey
| Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey

Most Chinese-English parallel corpora consist of English source texts translated into Chinese. This chapter discusses the need for corpora representative of the under-resourced Chinese into English translation direction. After a brief overview of the current Chinese-English translation scenario and an analysis of existing parallel corpora for this language pair, we discuss problems in mining contemporary Chinese to English translations and issues in Chinese to English parallel text alignment. We then introduce ZHEN, a corpus of circa one-million characters of contemporary simplified Chinese source texts from a range of text types aligned with authentic translations into English. Its aim is to contribute to our understanding of Chinese to English translation norms and of features of English translated from Chinese.

Keywords: parallel corpora, parallel text alignment, Chinese-English translation, ZHEN corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief overview of the Chinese-English translation scenario
  • 3.Chinese-English parallel corpora
  • 4.The ZHEN corpus
    • 4.1Text selection
    • 4.2Parallel text alignment
      • 4.2.1Alignment criteria
      • 4.2.2Alignment tools
    • 4.3Corpus compilation
  • 5.Applications of ZHEN
  • 6.Conclusion and future directions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 08 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.02gu
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