The Effect of Consulting COCA on Quality, Readability and Lexical Diversity of news translations from Farsi into English: A Corpusbased Study

In this paper the researchers attempted to compare the likely advantages of corpus-based translation approach to that of approaches based on conventional resources available to translators, like printed dictionaries and intuition.This article reports a detailed investigation of the effects of consulting Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) on the quality, readability and lexical diversity of translations of news from Farsi into English. To this end, thegraduate students of English Translation Studies from the University of Isfahan were asked to translate three pieces of300-word news on International Policies with every dictionary they would like. Then, in a training session they were taught how to search words, collocations, phrases, punctuation, etc. in COCA. In the next step, the students were askedto translate the same three items but this time with COCA. Then, their first and second sets of translations wereexamined to find out if consulting COCA had positive significant effects on translation quality, readability and lexicaldiversity. The findings of this study proved that consulting COCA when translating news from Farsi into English couldsignificantly improve the quality of translations, while it had no significant effect on the readability and lexical diversity of the renditions

Keywords:

Corpus of Contemporary American English , COCA , news translation , translation quality , readability , lexical diversity