Corpus-based Cultural Translation Study of COVID-19 Theme Translation

As the literature on COVID-19-themed translation continues to expand, the area of corpus-based cultural translation in this context still needs to be explored. This study investigates the types of information sharing and new databases that have emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and assesses the feasibility of human-machine interaction in the selection of translation strategies. Our study employs a systematic approach to analyze and compare the linguistic characteristics of epidemic-related English texts with those of general English texts. Using a keyword extraction method, we identify unique vocabulary features in each text type and then focus on the most salient features specific to the epidemic-related context. Drawing from COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 related research, the study examines the importance of texts in complex social situations, their influential role, and the potential for human-machine collaboration in translation strategy selection. The findings suggest combining functional equivalence theory and corpus analysis methods can effectively enhance cross-cultural communication for epidemic-related themes. This approach leads to improved translation quality through increased cohesion and coherence. The research delves deeper into the translation process by building upon the insights gained from the corpus study and adopting a communicative perspective. It goes beyond simply identifying equivalent terms and tackles the transfer of discursive phenomena, such as collocations, terminological variations, and semantic prosody from the source to the target language. The findings of this study confirm that corpus-based translation studies' contribution to ESP implies moving towards a communicative and socially oriented approach to specialized language.