An Application Of The Contrastive Analysis To English-Chinese Translation Teaching In Vocational College

Contrastive Analysis (CA) has been a kind of important method of foreign language teaching. The aim of CA is to bring out points of similarities and differences and thus to predict and explain learner's difficulties and errors in second language acquisition and to provide basis for the selection and grading of teaching material and for the organization and designing of syllabuses. As early as 1920s, CA was used to make a systematic and objective comparison of two or more than two languages, and was applied to language teaching. Linguistics and researchers home and abroad have done a lot of studies. The early contributors involve Nida (1982, 1998), Harald (2003).刘宓庆(1992),陈定安(1991),许余龙(2002) etc. have ever made contrastive analysis to native language and target language from different angles, and applied them to. the field of foreign language teaching and translation. However, these researches aim at professional students or senior students with advanced English level. The subject matters are mainly literature, poetry...etc. Their studies focus on Chinese-English (C-E) translation. English-Chinese(E-C) translation research, which aims at vocational college(esp. non-English major students) and which is characterized by its common subject matter and business related are inadequate. Based on the unsatisfied translation condition of vocational college students, the author tries to apply CA to E-C translation teaching in vocational college to explore some methods of improving E-C translation competence of the vocational college students.The psychology base of CA is transfer theory. Language transfer in foreign language (FL) studies can be classified into positive transfer and negative transfer. When the learner uses first language (L1) to study the common part of the two languages (such as subject, predicate, object...) in the process of acquiring second language (L2), he can learn with ease. Thus positive transfer can be realized successfully, promoting foreign language study. When the learner applies the knowledge in L1 to L2 inappropriately, or just applies the patterns or rules in L1 mechanically, thus creating mistakes or improper languages, negative transfer (namely harmful transfer or interference) can occur. A lot of mistakes in the students' translation are caused by such interference. For example: students translated the sentence "The match does not burn until rubbed on the box. " as "火柴不会燃烧,直到在火柴盒上摩擦之前。" Obviously the translators ignored their respective characteristics of English and Chinese. They just followed the Chinese thought pattern and thus made mistake in his translation. CA plays a very important role in overcoming such mistake or interference..How to use CA to teach FL is an important issue that a lot of teachers face, which is also the core of this research. In this paper the author collected some students' mistake translation samples from the daily teaching, exercises and examinations. And the author categorized them into different types from the level of vocabulary, sentence and discourse. Then the author gave a detailed analysis to the reasons.In order to improve the E-C translation competence of the vocational college students, the author designed an experiment. The author tries to apply CA to English teaching of the experimental group to check how the students' translation competence was developed. The experiment lasted for three months. There were pre-test and post-test. By comparing the result of the two tests of the two classes, the author found that CA promoted students' translation competence evidently, which proved that it is practical, necessary and important to apply CA to E-C translation teaching in vocational college.Finally, the author put forward some teaching suggestions on E-C translation.