A Study Of Negative Transfer In Efl Learners’ Chinese-english Translations

Negative transfer of learners’ previous knowledge often results in errors, and onmany occasions, it constitutes a hindrance to EFL learners’ second language learning.Translating is a process of converting information from one language into anotherlanguage, during which translators tend to be influenced by their L1. Therefore, it ismeaningful to investigate the occurrence of negative transfer in EFL learners’translation performance. The study was designed to explore the issue on the basis ofcontrastive analysis. And a translation task and an interview were carried out for datacollection. Forty-three second-year English majors at Xi’an International StudiesUniversity were selected for the experiment. They were required to finish thetranslation of20given sentences in40minutes, and they were interviewed followingtheir translation tasks. From the results, we find that L1negative transfer plays asignificant role in the students’ choice of words and syntactic structures. In the lexicalrespect, L1negative transfer manifests itself in use of articles and plural forms as wellas in expression of connotative and collocative meanings. In the syntactic respect, L1negative transfer manifests itself in the manipulation of conjunctions, tenses,subject-verb agreement, sentence structures and voice. Four sources of negativetransfer are summarized, including literal translation, new category, differentiation,and transfer of structure. This study will enable EFL learners to obtain a betterunderstanding of negative transfer errors occurring in their translation performanceand avoid the influence of their L1in their future translation. The findings of thisstudy will be useful for many ESL teachers to take into consideration the problemscaused by language transfer so that they can devise effective and useful methods indealing with such problems in the process of translator training.