A Study Of The Phenomena Of Europeanized Chinese From The Perspective Of Interlanguage Theory

Han Suyin’s Award for Young Translators is an annual translating contest across the country. Its reference versions of both E-C and C-E are compiled in Experts’Comments on and References to the Award-Winning Translations. We can get a clue to the field of translation studies by conducting research on the phenomena of the Europeanized Chinese in translation versions of the contest. So this paper makes a tentative study on the phenomena based on reference versions from Han Suyin’s Award for Young Translators by means of error analysis.Along with the development and changes of each country, its language keeps evolving as well. During the period of the Opium War, with the invasion of western cultures, especially after the May4th Movement, great changes have been taken place in China, such as the movement of vernacular Chinese. There emerges various translation works one after another in China. In the process of translating, due to the influence caused by western languages such as English for the most part, language transfer takes place. As a result, it leads to many changes of both grammatical and syntactical structures in Chinese. These special grammatical phenomena are somehow similar to that of the western languages but go against that of Han nationality. And then the phenomena generated in the translating process have been internalized and assimilated into traditional Chinese. The phenomena can be found in Lu Xun’s works. Up to now, more and more scholars both at home and abroad have noticed the phenomena and conducted research on the phenomena of Europeanized Chinese. They write reviews, summarize its categories, and point out errors that are caused by the phenomena in translation and deliver their translations, and expound causes of Europeanized Chinese.In translating English to Chinese, the translator may be influenced by English consciously or unconsciously. Either the negative or positive language transfer can make the phenomena of Europeanized Chinese happen. The theory of interlanguage may be applied to analyze the phenomena in a comparatively reasonable way. The interlanguage theory is a branch of second language acquisition and an important concept of SLA as well. It was introduced by Selinker in1969. It is an intermediate system standing between the languagel and the language2. Knowledge starts from the first language and approaches the second language just like a continuum. This is similar to that of the translating process. At one end of the continuum is the source language, and at the other end target language. Special grammatical phenomena engender during the translating process that starts from the end of SL and approaches to the end of TL. So based on the interlangauge theory, the phenomena is classified into five categories and then studied tentatively. As the translator in the near future, we should take a critical attitude towards the phenomena and also be aware of overusing it, for it will inhibit the development of our Chinese.