Drawing a Route Map of Making a Small Domain-Specific Parallel Corpus for Translators and Beyond

After years of development of corpus technologies, it has become obvious that translators can benefit directly from the achievements of this field. However, it seems that corpus advancement has not been deployed accordingly by translators to aid their translation. As a corpus linguist and translator myself, I believe that when corpus technologies are made attractive and simple enough and when they do feel a strong need and burning desire to make their own corpus to assist their translation, then application of such technology will gradually become part of a translator's life, just as other computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools have done over the past ten years or so. This paper attempts to make a demonstration as to how easy it can be to DIY a corpus by building a small domain-specific corpus between English and Chinese in the field of financial services. The making of such a corpus has been summarised into three simple steps: 1) Collection of raw parallel language data; 2) Alignment; 3) Segmentation and Annotation. It is hoped that other users of corpora including translation trainers, language teachers and students will also find this presentation informative and beneficial.