Corpus-based Priming for Inverse Translation Training

Training students to become competent translators out of their mother tongue is a challenging objective. Yet for Chinese undergraduate English majors, inverse translation is a necessary skill and an indispensible curricular component. In the pedagogical contexts, teachers and students of translation practice have generally found dictionaries to be of limited use as the explanations or answers offered are often de-contextualized, outdated, misleading or simply wrong. In contrast, corpora can offer more in-situ reference for the struggling translator. It is an area rather under-explored, especially in China, where not much research focusing on corpus-based priming in inverse translation training has been done. Presenting a case study of 50 Chinese undergraduate students majoring in English while they complete three rounds of translation of the same ST with/without different reference materials as tool kits, this paper explores whether, how and what types of corpora can be used in the classroom of translation training for quality improvement in student’s inverse translation practice. Upon analysis, evidence from the tentative experiment confirms that a corpus-based preparatory activation session prior to inverse translation serves to prepare students in terms of linguistic capacity and knowledge base for the task at hand. However, students might place too much importance on the technical aspects of the ST and become implicitly influenced more by the reference material in their translation of technical terms than the more general words and phrases in the original texts. Grammatical nuances and creative writing are also areas in which the priming effect is weak.