An Exploratory Study On The Features Of Lexical Phrases In Learners’ Chinese-English Translation Corpus

With the development of globalization and the Belt and Road,economic and cultural exchanges between China and the world have become more frequent and the status of translation has become more prominent.How to achieve accurate,appropriate and effective communication has always been the focus of academic attention.However,in foreign language teaching,translation tends to be neglected and learners’ translation ability is unsatisfactory.Lexical phrases have been proved to be positively correlated with specific language skills.At present,translation studies at home and abroad focus on the contribution of content,meaning and function to translation theory;and studies on lexical phrases focus on the relationship between lexical phrases and reading and writing.But the lexical features in translation,the effects of lexical phrases on accuracy and complexity of translation still need to be further explored.In view of this,124 English majors are selected to conduct a Chinese-English translation test.With the Chinese-English translation corpus and the tool of Wordsmith 4.0,the author collects the lexical phrases.SPSS are conducted to analyze the features of lexical phrases and the effects of lexical phrases on accuracy and complexity of translation corpus.This study also utilizes E-prime 2.0 to examine participants’ proficiency of lexical phrases in TED master copy.After analysis,the study results show that:(1)The mean frequency of lexical phrases is:sentence builders>phrasal constraints>polywords in each group.As for polywords,there are no significant differences between any two groups.As for phrasal constraints and sentence builders,the frequency of them in Group 2 and Group 3 is much higher than that in Group 1,but there are no significant differences of them between Group 2 and Group 3.(2)The accurate ratio of Group 2 and Group 3 is much higher than that of Group 1,whereas there exist no significant differences between Group 2 and Group 3.As for complexity,there are no significant differences between any two groups.Thus,the use of lexical phrases in this translation corpus only affects the accuracy of translation discourses but not the complexity of translation discourses.(3)Compared with the TED master copy,16 lexical phrases are rarely used in participants’ translation corpus.The results of E-prime 2.0 show that there are four lexical phrases whose unknown percentages are higher than others,and the reaction time of six lexical phrases is higher than the average reaction time.It can be seen that there are some different selections of lexical phrases between participants and native speakers,and some lexical phrases are difficult for participants.Therefore,this study has a good reference for future translation studies and teaching.Firstly,students should strengthen the learning of them,especially with the help of the classification and function.Secondly,teachers should give more constructive guidance on lexical phrases.Finally,considering the complexity of translation,teachers can give students more feedback on the mistakes caused by the use of lexical phrases in translation and encourage students to practice more to improve their confidence and motivation in the use of lexical phrases.