An Analysis Of Errors In Non-english Major’s Chinese-english Translation

Errors are unavoidable but also useful in language learning and they play an essential and assistant role in language acquisition. For the instructor, error analysis can assist him to know the distance from the present level of students to the teaching objective; as to the language researcher, learners’ errors provide evidence for the study on the language acquisition; and to the learner himself, making errors is one way he learns language, and this is the most important one. Besides what has been said above, error analysis has undoubtedly made great contributions to the study of second language learning and it has enriched the research achievements of second language teaching methodology.Because of its importance in language research, many scholars have studied the issue of error, however, research on non-English majors’ translation is relatively few. For this reason, this thesis has collected 300 Chinese-English translations to make a study. And this research primarily concentrates on the three points:(1) How many kinds of errors do students commit in the C-E translation? And how to classify them?(2) What are the reasons for these errors?(3) What are the implications for the teaching?Quantitative approach and qualitative approach are used in this thesis, the former of which is employed to deal with the total number of errors occurred in translations, the percentage of each kind of errors and the latter of which is used to describe the types of errors and analyze them.According to the research, it is found that the number of total errors is 2301 and those errors cover the three major types: substance errors, text errors and discourse errors. The percentages of each type are: 9.65%, 76.77% and 13.58%. Substance errors, mainly involving the wrong use of punctuation and non-standard writing, result from the confusion of the usage and function of English punctuation; and some students are influenced by Chinese to use Chinese punctuation in English. Text errors include lexical errors(the percentage of it is 21.42%) and grammar errors(the percentage is 55.35%), the former of which include formal and semantic errors and result from the lack of vocabulary and unfamiliarity with sense relations of words, the latter of which contain morphology and syntactic errors and are mainly caused by unfamiliarity with grammar rules in English, but the morphology errors are affected by Chinese as well. Because of the difference of expressing habits between Chinese and English and the countable practice of C-E translation, students are not capable to master the connection and coherence of meaning of the whole passage. This makes them commit the discourse errors.Besides, this thesis has explored helpful suggestions for translation teaching. No matter the substance error, lexical error, grammar error or the discourse error, they all need learners to learn constantly to avoid. While as a guide in learning, teachers should present the basic knowledge to students clearly, which include the punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, the difference among words as well as the most fundamental syntactic structures. Moreover, teachers ought to require learners to do more translation drill.