Corpus-Driven Study of Translation Units in an English-Chinese Parallel Corpus

It is widely acknowledged that texts are not translated word by word, but unit by unit. Single words are polysemous and therefore ambiguous in translation. Corpus linguistics, in monolingual context, has replaced the traditional basic notion of meaning (words) with the extended unit of meaning. Accordingly, this paper argues that in bilingual context, the translation unit, as the counterpart concept of the unit of meaning, replaces single words as the basic unit in translation. This paper aims at turning the study focus of parallel corpora from single words to larger units— translation units. It shows how to extend a selected sample of thirty Adjective+Noun (A+N) phrases into complete translation units by looking at their translation equivalence in an English-Chinese parallel corpus.