【摘要】 文章采用基于语料库的定量研究方法来分析翻译单位的本质属性,旨在厘清该概念的模糊性。首先总结了翻译单位的研究现状,指出该概念虽广为使用,却充满歧义。对比翻译单位的主要定义,提出翻译单位的四个本质特征,即紧密性、独立性、无歧义性和无对应性。然后从NIST 2002机器翻译测试集中选取491对句珠,分别依据以上特征对其中的翻译单位进行手工标记。统计表明,特征值选取不同,翻译单位的标注结果也不尽相同。研究认为:翻译单位实际上是一系列的源文单位,它们由于源文的形式或语义特征、源文与译文的对比关系或译者的翻译策略等因素,最终作为一个整体进行分析或转换。更多还原

【Abstract】 The present study revisited the notion of the unit of translation in a corpus-based quantitative manner so as to do away with the ambiguity of the concept. It first provided an overview of the contemporary researches on the unit of translation, pointing out that the term, albeit frequently used, is still filled with ambiguity. The comparison between the heterogeneous definitions of the unit of translation yielded four definitive features of the unit of translation, namely, compactness, independence, lack of ambiguity and lack of correspondence. Meanwhile, a quantitative research was conducted, in which the units of translation in a parallel corpus of 491 sentence pairs extracted from NIST 2002 test bed for machine translation evaluation program were manually marked in accordance with the above-mentioned four features. The statistical observation on the annotated corpus showed that the unit of translation varies in size and scale in accordance with the features adopted for demarcation. It arrived at the conclusion that the unit of translation is in fact a series of source text units which have to be rendered as a whole due to multi-factors, such as the formal and semantic features of the source text, the correspondence between the source text and the target text or the specific translation strategies of the translator.更多还原