A Study Of Translation Process In Handling Lexical Gaps With The Application Of TAPs Method

Lexical gap, the absence in the target language of a ready expression conveyed by a word or idiom in the source language, is one of the barriers that hinder the communications between people from different countries. For English and Chinese belong to Indo-European language system and Sino-Tibetan language system respectively, there are a large pound of lexical gaps between English and Chinese, and these lexical gaps always lead to many misunderstandings. Proper handling of these lexical gaps during translation is of great importance in cross-cultural communication between China and other countries. Former researchers have been studying lexical gaps from linguistic and cultural perspective, and they have gained many valuable achievements. Since 1980s, process-oriented studies have drawn researchers'attention from many fields, such as linguistics, psychology and translation. Whereas, a process-oriented study of the translation process in handling lexical gaps in E-C (English-Chinese) translation and C-E (Chinese-English) translation cannot be found. With the rise and development of process-oriented studies, more and more scholars find that this kind of studies can reveal the essence of translation better and can make translation a more developed and comprehensive subject. As for process-oriented studies, think-aloud protocols method (TAPs) is mostly applied. In this paper, a TAPs study of the translation process in handling lexical gaps is to be conducted.As the number of subjects in previous TAPs researches is far smaller than 30, and the difficulty when selecting subjects and analyzing the data, in this research, eight third year postgraduate students from the College of Foreign Languages in Chongqing University are selected as subjects. 10 English sentences and 10 Chinese sentences which all include vocabularies that will cause lexical gaps are selected as testing materials (20 sentences are selected for the purpose of controlling the translation time between 1 and 2 hours). The TAPs experiment is conducted in a small classroom. After the experiment, the recordings of their verbalizations are coded as data in computer and both a qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data are carried out. On the basis of these analyses, conclusions are drawn as the follows.Firstly, in both E-C translation and C-E translation process, the seven student translators decode the SL vocabularies that cause lexical gaps in mother tongue, also they use mother tongue thinking mode to help them produce the TL output. It is shown that almost all of their verbalizations are Chinese, though some English words popped up occasionally. They use the mother tongue-Chinese in the whole process, which may be due to, to a large extent, the lack of knowledge about English language and English culture.Secondly, these student translators use more strategies when dealing with lexical gaps in E-C translation process, while, they use fewer strategies in C-E translation process. In addition, they use far more strategies in the decoding process in E-C translation and use far more strategies in the re-encoding process in C-E translation. This can be due to the fact that they have more reception problems in E-C translation while much more production problems in C-E translation.Thirdly, associating, guessing, inferring and dictionary consulting are the four most frequently adopted strategies in E-C translation process, while rephrasing is the most frequently used strategy in C-E translation process. These student translators are likely to associate, guess, infer and consult dictionaries and at the same time detecting by world information, context and any other information to work out a tentative solution in E-C translation process. However, in C-E translation, they are likely to work out an output by rephrasing the SL vocabularies to a simpler expression and then translate these simplified expressions into TL language.It is hoped that this TAPs research will provide some pedagogical benefits for translation teaching and this tentative study can bring some meaningful values to process-oriented studies in translation fields.