Using search engines as a retrieval tool for translating newly coined expressions and terminology between Chinese and English

Abstract

Abstract Translating terminology and newly coined expressions is a daunting challenge for technical translators. Translation of such words or phrases between, e.g. Chinese and English has received little help from dictionaries. With this as motivation, this study explores four methods by analysing results from an experiment with search engines as a retrieval tool for tackling such translation tasks. Specifically, taking 700 new terminologies from The Oxford English Dictionary as the research objects, this study experimentally examines the four terminology translation extraction methods. For each method, the effectiveness is assessed. This article finds that template-based and dictionary-based translation extraction methods have the highest accuracy rates of 86 and 89%, respectively. The semantic prediction search method proves to be the most flexible with the highest retrieval rate of 95%, although its results are not always accurate. Based on the results, this study proposes a model for quantitatively and qualitatively verifying the accuracy of translation results obtained from search engines. The quantitative analysis examines the use frequency of all translations obtained, while the qualitative analysis looks into their contexts. These findings have implications for translating, via search engine retrieval tools, terminology between other language pairs.