Research Into Bilingual Chunk Representation And Its Correlation With Chunk Comprehension Strategies And Translation Output In E-C Translation

Many studies have proved that representation proficiency of prefabricated chunks has a close relationship with the efficiency of translating process, the strategies they use and quality of translated texts. Nevertheless, few researches have been conducted on the relationship between bilingual chunk representation proficiency and processing strategies in source language understanding in translation. This study, therefore, will make a further step to study on this relationship.Prefabricated chunk in this research is defined as "fixed, semi-fixed or non-fixed word sequences which are stored, represented and retrieved from the mental lexicon holistically as a unit". And they are classified into three types:polywords, Institutionalized expressions and phrasal constraints (labeled as Chunk1, Chunk2and Chunks3respectively in our study).A model of the representation and processing of bilingual chunks is built by the researcher on the basis of former studies.Two experiments are designed to find out the correlation between bilingual chunk representation and processing strategies in source language understanding. One is Lexical Decision Task for assessing the subject’s bilingual representation proficiency and for grouping into two levels. The other is Think Aloud Protocol, through which18chunk processing or comprehension strategies of different frequency of use used are extracted and analyzed.The research focuses on4main research questions:Ql:What are the main features of bilingual chunk representation of Chinese translation majors of different levels?Q2:What are the main chunk processing strategies used by these translation majors in source language understanding?Q3:What’s the relationship between bilingual chunk representation proficiency and processing strategies in source language comprehension in E-C translation? Q4:What’s the relationship between bilingual chunk representation proficiency and the quality of translated texts?With the data collected and analyzed, major findings are concluded as follows:First, The Chinese translation majors have higher representation proficiency of Chinese chunks than that of English chunks.Second, the two groups are different in terms of their performance in each English chunk type.Third, although both groups use more unconscious strategies than complimentary strategies, the proportions of the FU (frequency of use) of the two types of strategies are quite different between two groups.Fourth, subjects of different chunk proficiency understand chunks in different angles.Fifth, different groups have different sensitivity to chunks.Moreover, no matter what level of representation proficiency, the distributions of frequency of use of the strategies have no great discrepancies, though they exist, throughout three types of chunks.At last, high-level group produces a much better target language texts than low-level group. And the with-in group performance fluctuation is much lower in high-level group than in low-level group.