Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Practical Translation

With the growing trend of online teaching and learning today, the use of corpora is an effective student-oriented educational means to develop translation competence, and learner’s autonomy. In view of this, the Translation Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce the launch of the Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Practical Translation (“the Corpus"; weblink: CUHK PR Corpus). The Corpus encompasses a wide range of texts related to PR and tourism from major and famous local corporations or non-governmental organisations.

The project was funded by the one-off special grant for strategic development of virtual teaching and learning by the Hong Kong Education Bureau, under the supervision of Dr Kurt Law and Dr Lily Li. A large collection of authentic parallel full texts from the PR and tourism fields are included, accounting for 52 bilingual texts, with an estimated total number of 102,000 words. The keywords or phrases related to the theme of the texts, proper nouns, rhetorical devices, sub-headings and headings, and their equivalent translations are annotated with the use of the software Wordfast Anywhere and Excel, and also manually to reduce the false pairs brought by machine annotation. Since the selected texts are produced by reputable companies or non-governmental organisations, the translations are of high quality, and can serve as learning samples for teaching and learning.

In order to archive a parallel presentation format, the texts are arranged passage to passage, paragraph to paragraph. For the sake of readability and efficiency, each pair of annotations is highlighted in red, when the cursor is pointed to either the Chinese or English keyword. Below is an example of the corpus:

Figure 1: The homepage of the Corpus

Figure 2 (Source: Hong Kong Tourism Board)

This user-friendly interface facilitates an effortless search by hovering your mouse over the desired words from lengthy articles, and thus pinpointing their equivalence.

In brief, the Parallel Bilingual Corpus is an accessible online database with reliable and authentic references for translators and translation students for teaching, learning, and reference purposes.