The Study On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Chinese-English Translation Of English Majors In Vocational Schools

Language transfer has been a central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) for at least a century. It is widely accepted that language transfer can be mainly classified as positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer is the facilitation of the first language through its similarities with the target language; while negative transfer is the influence of the first language, resulting from the dissimilarities between the first language and the target language. As a process involving the shift of bilingual information, translation process is particularly constrained by the negative transfer of the first language. This study is an effort to explore the negative transfer at the lexical level in the translation works if English majors in vocational schools.The theory of Contrastive Analysis was adopted to see the similarities and differences between English and Chinese on the level of word meaning (conceptual meaning, connotative meaning and collocative meaning). Contrastive Analysis is formulated by Lado. In terms of this theory, the 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. Based on the comparison, the possible difficulties in second language acquisition can be predicted. We thus designed a translation test to testify the errors students possibly make in their translation works. The theory of Error Analysis is employed in finding the different types of translation errors and their frequencies. Based on these theories and analysis, two hypotheses are made as follows:first, the occurrence of negative transfer on collocative meaning may be the highest; second, the occurrence of negative transfer in conceptual meaning may be the lowest.In this study,60 3rd year English majors from Shaanxi College of Communication Technology were sampled as the subjects. Based on the different word meanings between Chinese and English, a test paper is designed to observe the negative transfer of Chinese, and then the test results such as the types of errors and their frequencies are analyzed in the framework of Error Analysis Theory.From the results of the test we can conclude that:transfer errors happen mostly in the translation of collocative meaning; transfer errors in the translation of the connotative meaning come in the second; and transfer errors in the translation of the conceptual meaning are the least. Thus, the two assumptions made by the author are proved correct.At the end of the thesis, some suggestions which based on the findings were given to the teachers. It is suggested that teachers themselves should have a good command of different word meanings between English and Chinese. Especially at the beginning of the Chinese-English translation learning, students should be informed to master not only the conceptual meaning of a word, but also the connotative and co locative meanings. Students should be encouraged to apply the Contrastive Analysis Theory in their translation learning.The research is a mere attempt to investigate the phenomenon of negative transfer in translation practice and some suggestions are given to avoid the negative effects of the first language transfer. There are still some defects and limitations in the research design and analysis; therefore, further study will be needed.