Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In College Students' Chinese-English Translation

Based on the theories of language transfer, contrastive analysis and error analysis, an empirical study is made in this thesis on the phenomenon of negative transfer in college students' Chinese-English translation. Through the present research, this thesis attempts to answer the following questions:1) What is the proportion of transfer errors in students' C-E translation products?2) What is the proportion of transfer errors at different levels of language?3) How does the negative transfer of mother tongue (MT) cause errors in students' C-E translation products?4) Pedagogically, what can be done to overcome MT interference and improve the translation competence of non-English majors?Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, and under the guidance of Error Analysis, errors caused by MT interference in the C-E translation products of 50 second-year non-English majors from Hubei University of Chinese Medicine were analyzed to find their distribution and frequency. And, these errors are analyzed through contrastive analysis between Chinese and English in detail. It is found that errors caused by MT interference, that is, interlingual errors, account for 52.1% of the total, among which,interlingual errors at the grammar level are of the highest frequency, taking up 41.8%. The study indicates that negative transfer of MT has a great influence on college students'C-E translation.Based on the research findings, some pedagogical implications as to how to overcome MT interference and improve the translation competence of non-English majors are offered. First, English teachers should help increase students' awareness of differences between Chinese and English by carrying out comparisons between the two. Second, English teachers should still place much emphasis on the teaching of English grammar and lexicon to help students establish a solid linguistic foundation. Third, English teachers should encourage students to read extensively for a better mastery of authentic English. Last, English teachers should introduce some basic C-E translating techniques to students in the classroom teaching.