Negative Transfer In Chinese-English Sight Translation

Language transfer has been a central issue in second language acquisition.Many scholars also employ its theory in translation studies to explain the mistakes and errors in one’s translation product.However,no study has associated negative transfer to interpreter’s cognitive load.This thesis aims to explore the negative transfer in Chinese-English sight translation from the cognitive perspective,with evidence from an eye tracking experiment.It seeks to discuss the following three questions.1)Is there any correlation between the negative transfer and interpreter’s cognitive load when performing the Chinese-English sight translation task? 2)If so,which kind of negative transfer most greatly affect subject’s cognitive load? 3)What lessons can we draw from the research results from the pedagogical point of view? Are there any suggestions for interpreting trainees to choose suitable strategies in order to overcome the problems brought about by negative transfer?This thesis tries to examine the impact of negative transfer regarding different sentences in the stimuli text by evaluating subjects’ average performance and then compare the results with their eye movement data concerning each sentence.Fixation duration and fixation count are two measures of eye movements to indicate one’s cognitive effort.Longer fixation duration and more fixation counts are a sign of more effortful processing;shorter fixation duration and fewer fixation counts are a sign of less effortful processing.The contrastive analysis of those two sets of data will reveal whether there is correlation between negative transfer and one’s cognitive load.Results show that there is correlation between the negative transfer and interpreter’s cognitive load.Generally,when one is more greatly affected by the negative transfer,he or she will demonstrate more cognitive load.Negative transfer can influence the translation product on both the lexical level and grammatical level.Both types have impact on one’s cognitive load.Interpreting trainees need to improve their language proficiency,raise awareness of negative transfer in sight translation and flexibly adopt different translation strategies to overcome the trouble caused by negative transfer.