Effects Of Translation Continuation Task On The Chinese-english Translation Of Novels By Chinese Undergraduates

The translation continuation task refers to the involvement of “extension” between translation comprehension and production,thus combining the two of them intimately.By virtue of the leveling effect caused by “extension”,the efficiency of translation learning can be improved(Wang 2018).Translation continuation task integrates comprehension into production,hereby enhancing the interaction and alignment between them.Therefore it can make learners see the gap between their language proficiency and the high quality translation text more clearly,stimulating them to narrow the gap through imitation and alignment,so as to improve the ability of language application(Xu 2016).Based on the above theoretical background,this study took the English translation of the Chinese novel Oh,Xiangxue by Chinese undergraduates as an example,adopting think-aloud protocols,comparing and analyzing the translation process and translation quality of experimental group and control group to explore the effects of translation continuation task.The research questions of this thesis are as follows:(1)Does participants of experimental group make alignment in the translation continuation task of the novel Oh,Xiangxue in terms of words,phrases and sentences?(2)Does the experimental group produce fewer errors and achieve higher scores in the Chinese-English translation tasks?(3)Does the translation continuation task of the novel Oh,Xiangxue have any delayed effects?To answer the three research questions,an empirical study was carried out.In the experiment,24 freshmen from Guangzhou University were randomly divided into experimental group and control group with 12 students in each group.After a test,there was no significant difference in the results of Chinese-English translation between the two groups.The experiment lasted for four weeks,namely,the pilot study,test 1,test 2 and test 3.In test 1,the experimental group read the Chinese-English previous reading material excerpted from the novel Oh,Xiangxue within 20 minutes,while the control group read the Chinese previous reading material.Then the two groups completed the same translation task and the time was 30 minutes.In the third and fourth weeks,the two groups completed a translation test weekly.In each test,think-aloud protocols were adopted to record the translation process.The results show that:(1)participants of experimental group made alignment in the translation continuation task of the novel Oh,Xiangxue in terms of words,phrases and sentences;(2)participants of experimental group made significantly fewer errors than those of control group in all three tests,specifically fewer lexical errors in test 1 and fewer morphological errors in all three tests.Moreover,the mean scores of experimental group were signif-icantly higher than those of the control group in all three tests.It shows that translation continuation task is conducive to the improvement of translation quality;(3)the translation continuation task had delayed effects in the usage of repeated key words and repeated language structures as well as in reducing morphological errors and improving participants’ translation scores.Moreover,the delayed effects were affected by time and the contents of the experimental materials.On the whole,this study verified the effects of translation continuation task on the Chinese-English translation of the novel Oh,Xiangxue.Meanwhile,this study provides some implications for translation teaching and learning.Most importantly,teachers and learners can improve the efficiency of translation learning by increasing the frequency and dimension of interaction with the high quality translation texts.