Report On Error Analysis In Chinese-English Translation By Senior High School Students

In senior high school English teaching, translation is one of the most important skills and verydifficult to do well. The Ordinary Senior High School New English Curriculum Standards (Experimental)(2003) illustrates that general ability to use language is established on the basis of development of languageskills, language knowledge, feelings and attitudes, learning strategies and cultural consciousness. Culturalconsciousness is the guarantee for using language properly.Researchers started to transfer their attention to Error Analysis in order to classify errors and findthe causes of errors because Contrastive Analysis cannot predict all the errors committed by secondlanguage learners. Error Analysis consists of five steps: collection of a sample of learner language,identification of errors, description of errors, explanation of errors and evaluating errors. Error Analysismainly analyzes interlinguage.Many researches on error analysis focused on senior high school students' writing, while few ontheir Chinese-English(C-E) translation. This thesis aims to study C-E translation errors committed by40Grade two students in senior high school by using WordSmith in order to classify these errors and find thecauses of these errors. Based on Contrastive Analysis(CA), Error Analysis(EA), Interlanguage(IL) andLanguage Transfer, the present study seeks to answer the following three research questions:1What kinds of errors do grade two senior high school students tend to make in theirChinese-English translation by using WordSmith?2What are the causes of these errors?3What measures should be taken to deal with these problems to improve their expressive abilityto Chinese-English translation?The research verifies that lexical errors and grammatical errors are usually committed in students'translation. The causes of these errors can be ascribed to interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer and otherelements. The author puts forward negative transfer can be solved by strengthening comparing mothertongue with foreign language. In the other hand, students should do more translation exercises.The present study has some limitations which should continue to be perfected in the future research because of the limited time and space. However, it is sincerely hoped that the study can providesome reference with the translation teaching in senior high school.