Abstract
English-Japanese translation tasks in the English examination for the maritime officers' certificate are syntactically and lexically challenging for Japanese maritime students who want to work as navigational officers in an international shipping industry. English texts in the examination are extracted from maritime legal documents and they have not only complicated syntactic structures but also maritime legal vocabulary. In addition, students have not sufficient knowledge of maritime English vocabulary (Ito et al., 2015; Fujirai et al., 2021; Mizushima, 2023). I created a word list based on a corpus compiled from 56 texts used in past examinations, employing the integrated values of word frequency and range (i.e., the number of texts in which each word appears) (Ishikawa, 2018) as extraction and ordering criteria. Following words were excluded from the list: words in New JACET 8000 word list that are widely used in Japanese junior high school English textbooks; maritime loan words; and words with low frequency, narrow range, or low learning value. The final 278 words (the 2nd-grade Maritime Examination Word List) cover more than 25% of the original corpus. The final list covers more words than that of two previous maritime word lists. If 278 words have been learned in advance, students can easily comprehend the texts without referring to their dictionaries frequently, allowing them to focus on text comprehension and translation tasks. However, usefulness of this list must be tested based on clearer standards for comparing multiple word lists.
Author Information
Yuto Mizushima, Marine Technical College & Japan Agency of Maritime Education and Training for Seafarers, Japan
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