A Contrastive Analysis Of Li's Negative Transfer In The Chinese-English Translation Between English And Non-English Majors

In the process of English learning, mother tongue transfer plays a role of great importance and it has always been a heated topic in the linguistic literature. Anyone who wants to offer sufficient interpretation of second language acquisition or foreign language teaching has to take the critical factor—language transfer into consideration (Gass & Selinker,1992). Since translating is one of the five basic skills for English study, it enjoys a significant status in both English learning and teaching. And thus the current study intends to focus on one aspect—the Chinese-English translation to analyze the negative influence of mother tongue. By analyzing the difference in the degree of negative influence of transfer in Chinese-English translation between English majors and non-English majors, the current study is intended to investigate the fundamental reasons behind this. Specifically, the author aims at answering the following questions:1. Whether there is significant difference concerning the L1's negative transfer in Chinese-English translation between English and non-English majors?2. If there is, what is the difference in the degree of negative influence of L1 transfer in Chinese-English translation between English and non-English majors?A. What proportion of the total errors comes from English majors and non-English majors respectively?B. What are the tendencies of transfer errors in these two groups?C. What might be the possible factors behind this kind of difference?For this study, both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. The empirical study is dominant and descriptive study serves as additional explanations for the transfer error types.The subjects are 110 sophomores from Shandong University, among which 60 were majoring in English and 50 in economics. They are told to do a Chinese-English translation test, and at the same time the students are required to fill in a questionnaire about translating strategy use when they finish their translation tasks. After the collection of the samples, an experienced foreign teacher is invited to assist the author in analyzing the errors made in the translation. In addition, the SPSS software is also adopted to analyze the subjects'responses to the questionnaire. Finally, the study gets some useful findings: significant differences concerning transfer errors do exist in the Chinese-English translation between English and non-English majors and that can be ascribed to the differences in their translation strategy use to some extent. At last, some implications are also drawn from this study for both English learning and teaching.