The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Chinese-English Translation

Language transfer has been a controversial topic in the second language acquisition, within the last few decades; its importance in foreign language learning has been reassessed several times. Recently, it has aroused scholars' interest again and been discussed from different perspectives. Language transfer can be classified as positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer is the facilitation of the mother tongue through the similarities between the mother tongue and the target language; while negative transfer is the interference of the mother tongue, resulting from the dissimilarities between the mother tongue and the target language. As a process involving the shift of bilingual information, translation process is, in particular, constrained by the phenomenon of negative transfer. Translators may utilize the idiomatic expressions of their native language in the process of translating. The negative transfer of mother tongue is very salient in Chinese-English translation in that the two languages bear little in common because of their different origins. The present study is an effort to explore the transfer problem at lexical level in the translation products of English majors.In the study, the theories of Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis, as well as the classification and manifestations of language transfer are elaborated on and underlie the theoretical framework of the study. Contrastive analysis is formulated by Lado, based on the theories of behaviorist psychology and structuralism. In terms of this theory, the learning difficulty in the second language acquisition primarily results from the influence of the mother tongue and the systematic comparison between the mother tongue and the target language are strongly suggested. While the theory of error analysis, represented by Corder,S.P, takes all the possibilities of learning difficulty, both the interlingual elements and the intralingual elements, into consideration. Enlightened by these theories, the author made a research to investigate the transfer problem occurred in Chinese-English translation practice.In this research, 54 English majors of grade one from Northwest Normal University are randomly sampled as the subjects in the experiment. The instrument used in this study is translation test paper.Many kinds of transfer errors in lexicon are found in the subjects' translation products. It is found that the subjects committed most transfer errors in the connotative meaning; transfer errors in the collocative meaning came the second, and transfer errors in the semantic domain came the third.Some suggestions are given to translation teachers based on the findings. It is suggested that translation teachers should introduce some related knowledge involving the differences between Chinese and English. Contrastive Analysis should be highlighted to arouse students' knowledge of negative transfer.The research is only an attempt to investigate the phenomenon of negative transfer in translation practice. There are still some defects on the research design and analysis; therefore, further study will be needed in the future.