Construction of an On-Line Platform for Computer-aided Teaching and Learning of Bilingual Writing and Translating in/between English and Chinese

Abstract

A substantial development from CityU Projects 6980030 and 7100174-590, tins project proposes to build an electroruc platfo1m for on-line teaching/(self-)leaming of bilingual writing and translation in/between English and Chinese (traditional & simplified) in the first instance, covering 11 pragmatic text-types, each containing 30,000-word English and 50,000-character Chinese parallel data (translational and non-translational pairs produced in different English and Chinese speaking regions). It comprises: I) corpora-construction: 1.1) data-collection/inputting and 1.2) data-annotation; 2) text-analysis: theoretically-informed investigations to generate a system of glossed 'tag-words' to identify/describe textual phenomena for data-annotation; and 3) electronic progrannne design. The database, automatically/manually annotated under a text-linguistics-informed tag-word system, forms a constantly updatable set of corpora leading to the compilation/publication of a series of textbooks. This may use around 1/4 of the data content (including annotations) as a self-sufficient publication with instruction manual for operating the complete on-line system. The products can be scheduled for use by 2012, to help alleviate the pressure on the teaching of labour-intensive courses of translation and (bilingual) writing/editing in a then 4-year university curriculum, with possibilities for distance learning. The systematic tag-words can also make the OBTL pedagogically and statistically accountable. Findings can also be disseminated internationally as conference/refereed journal papers.