A Probe Into English And Chinese Lexical Gaps And Foreign Language Teaching

It is well known that each country has its own cultural traits, and cultural features are reflected on vocabulary. The comparison of linguistic and cultural differences shows the existence of lexical gaps between English and Chinese. Lexical gaps occur in such fields as science and technology, political-economic system, philosophy, religion, medical and athletic tradition, literature and social life, and manifest in the different grammatical categories between English and Chinese like number, gender, person, tense and aspect, voice and collocation.This study is to remove the barriers posed by lexical gaps and bridge the lexical gaps between English and Chinese. For this purpose, the present paper explores into some manifestations and factors of lexical gaps, and then focuses on how to deal with lexical gaps in language teaching. To bridge the lexical gaps and get rid of the cultural blindness, the author has applied a few ways in vocabulary teaching, such as cultural introduction, contrastive analysis, presentation of etymology, consciousness-raising, settling the relationship between source and target languages, and guiding how to master the cultural connotations through different channels; To improve the students' competence of translation, the author has advocated using such techniques as transliteration, literal translation, paraphrase, cultural substitution and so on, in translation teaching. The author believes that the research on lexical gaps has both theoretical and practical values.