Investigating the Chinese and English Language Proficiency of Tertiary Students in Hong Kong: Perspectives from the Hong Kong Subset of the Multilingual Student Translation Corpus

This study aims to investigate the Chinese and English language proficiency of tertiary students in Hong Kong through the unique lens of translation. An error-annotated translation learner corpus was developed — the Hong Kong subset of the Multilingual Student Translation (MUST) corpus, following the standard of an international multilingual corpus initiative for the study of translated language of language learners and translation students worldwide (Granger & Lefer, 2017). The corpus included Chinese‒English and English‒Chinese translations of students from higher education institutions in Hong Kong, totaling 200,000 word-tokens. It also collected detailed contextual information of the source texts, student translators, translation tasks, etc. The corpus was annotated according to a standardized error annotation scheme (ibid). Findings of the study will show the frequencies of errors in students’ Chinese and English translations. They will also indicate the relationship between the types of language errors and contextual/learner factors. The study, unveiling the problematic aspects in the Chinese and English language proficiency of tertiary students in Hong Kong, will help to pinpoint the most urgent problems for improvement. It will shed light on the design of language proficiency enhancement strategies catering for the needs of different students. The annotated learner corpus will serve as a valuable teaching resource for bilingual education tailored to students in Hong Kong.