Analysis Of Typical Errors In English Major Students’Translation Practices

The Test for English Majors-Band Eight (TEM-8) is the national test organized and held by the English group of the Higher Education Foreign Language Major Teaching Guiding Committee of China’s Ministry of Education. It is used to test whether senior college students majoring in English reach Level8of the English language provided by the teaching syllabus. Due to its difficulty and high requirements, TEM-8has gradually become the universally accepted standards and students give it more attention. Translation is an important part of TEM-8. It is used to examine students’comprehensive ability of English-Chinese and Chinese-English conversion. However, translation is a complicated process, which requires students to master both languages’fundamentals, vocabulary understanding, discourse interpretation, translation skills and cultural understanding, and so on. Because they involve many aspects, types of errors exit on every level. But, in recent years study of error types and error reason analysis has been paid scanty attention to. On the contrary, the study mainly focuses on translation teaching and how to cultivate students’translation ability.This thesis tries to give a discussion of errors found in translation practices of English majors, with Error Analysis (EA) as the theoretical basis and on the basis of previous studies. As for some typical mistakes I will give them a classification, and analyze the causes so as to find out the coping strategy. First, it is an overview of translation teaching for English majors in our country, and then the thesis gives a general discussion of how to cultivate and improve English major students’translation ability. And then the author of this thesis has collected some translation exercises (mainly previous TEM-8translation materials) of English major students at Yangtze University, and found out some typical errors which are analyzed and classified. On the basis of EA the author has analyzed the reasons for interlingual language errors and intralingual language errors, and put forward several strategies. Finally, the author makes a conclusion for the whole study, and points out the significance and weaknesses in the present study.The first chapter introduces the object of this study, the purpose and significance and the methods used and the overall structure of the thesis briefly.The second chapter is a literature review. First, it makes a brief introduction to the current status of domestic research on translation teaching for English majors and the new development of overseas translation teaching, and then introduces the study on translation ability training.Finally, it summarizes the study on translation errors analysis.Chapter Three is the theoretical framework for the study. This chapter gives a brief introduction to EA, especially Corder’s six stages in EA research.Chapter Four is the basis for Chapter Five. This chapter offers an overview of translation teaching for English majors. It is based on The National Teaching Syllabus for English Majors of Institutions of Higher Learning (2000) to discuss the teaching objectives, especially translation skills, and puts emphasis on cultivation and improvement of students’translation ability.Chapter Five is the main body of this thesis. This chapter is a study of errors in English majors’translations on the basis of error analysis (EA). The author has collected some translation practices concerning the past authentic TEM-8translation materials for third-year students of English major at Yangtze University, and selected several students’ exercises for analysis, finding out some typical mistakes in Chinese-English (C-E) translations, such as errors in grasping the connotations of words, misuse of parts of speech, redundant translation, mechanical correspondence in sentence structure, improper discourse cohesion, and so on. In English-Chinese (E-C) translations, problems include misunderstanding of words, borrowing the function words of the original, retaining the word order and expression mode of the original, lack of background knowledge, and so on. On the basis of EA, the thesis analyzes the examples of the errors including interlingual language errors and intralingual language errors. In terms of interlingual language errors, the present study focuses on their lexical aspect, grammar aspect and cultural aspect. Intralingual language errors refer to overgeneralization of rules of the target language. Finally, the thesis puts forward some coping strategies, giving some suggestions from teachers’and students’angles respectively. The author thinks that we should improve the teaching method and focus on cultivating students’ translation ability. Of course, the efforts of their own’s are also important.Chapter Six summarizes the whole thesis, and points out the significance of the research findings and the weaknesses of this study. I hope that the future research on the topic can perfect the imperfections in this study and further the development of research on the question studied in this thesis.