hipin, and in IALME, it does not appear. Of course, the scale of the corpus constitutes one factor for this phenomenon, but a conclusion can be drawn that Chinese have not totally accepted the term youji shipin. In other words, youji shipin has not become a semi-term, and it is used most often by those experts in the specified field. In contrast, lüse shipin has invaded the daily speech of the Chinese people. This proves our classification of lüse shipin as a semi-term. Next, we can further examine the concordance lines of the two terms. There are ten co-occurring concordance lines of lüse shipin and youji shipin, occupying 62.5% of the total concordance lines of youji shipin. The co-occurring concordance lines are provided below:

        

       From those materials, we can see that youji shipin is a rather specialized concept, belonging to the category of pure terms, at most a general term. Many writers of the corpus's texts mention it with direct explanation following the term for the convenience of the reader, such as in concordance lines 1, 2, 4. Other writers do not know the difference between lüse shipin and youji shipin, such as concordance lines 3, 6, 7, 8, and there are even some writers consider lüse shipin as exactly youji shipin, such as concordance lines 6, 7, 8.

       Thus, through the corpus-based research, it can be shown that lüse shipin, due to its concreteness and vividness, is a semi-term in Chinese, for its literal meaning, "green food," produced a favorite association with natural food. In contrast, youji shipin is borrowed from abroad, and those who do not understand the concept of this term are likely to consider it identical to lüse shipin in China. This certainly flouts the terminological principle of unique correspondence between name and concept. The way of saying that organic food is similar to lüse shipin in China, however, provides a hint for translators when they translate the Chinese term into English.

       4. A corpus research of terms in the TL

       During the translation process, the research of TL corpora and the use of Internet search engines6 can provide important information for translators about the usage of certain words and inspire tentative translations into the TL. As for the two proposed versions of lüse shipin--green food and organic food, we also need to investigate the British National Corpus, BNC7 and the Collins WordbanksOnline English Corpus (abbreviated as Collins in this paper) 8 to find their respective usage. The results are as follows:

       Table 2 The Frequency of Organic Food and Green Food

         organic food green food

       BNC 0.40 per MW (40) 0.12 per MW (12)

       Collins 0.021 per MW (12) 0,007 per MW (4)

       * NOTE: MW means million words.

       From Table 2, it can be seen that the frequency of organic food is almost three times as that of green food, which suggests that organic food is relatively common. This is closely connected with the fact that the term organic farming originates from Western countries. Next, we further check the infrequent occurrences of green food, and find that it often co-occurs with the word colouring(s) and colour on the right, among which, BNC has 9 concordance lines of green food colouring(s) and Collins has two concordance lines of green food coloring and two concordance lines of green food colour (powder). All the concordance lines of green food are listed below:

       1 through a near-famine when a plague of caterpillars ate most of the green food. It was recorded by a convict who was on the

       2 the green tops remain, pastures, and indeed anywhere where green food is evident. The Netting Operation With your preparation and your

       3 icing sugar 2 egg whites 2 tsps lemon juice Almond essence Green food colouring Method 1 Beat the icing sugar, egg white and

       4 plants, SHE's cookery editor Clare Ferguson will talk about Green food and show you how to make it. Colin Shawyer of

       5 icing sugar, 1 small egg white, Peppermint flavouring, Green food colouring. 1 Sieve the icing sugar into bowl 2.

       6 for a few minutes. 4 Colour the desiccated coconut with green food colouring for grass. Spread a little

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