Using The TAP To Investigate English Learners Strategies In Translating Chinese Cultural Words

Translation studies include translation products, translation process and translators. However, due to the lack of research methods for a long time, research scholars tend to be more concerned about translation products and translators than translation process. The awkward situation hasn’t made difference until the 1980s when the think-aloud protocols(TAP) in psychology is applied to linguistic study. With the help of TAP, more and more scholars come to focus their attention on the translation process.This paper, based on the related achievements in the field of translation process studies, uses the think-aloud protocols to describe and analyze cognitive characteristics of translation strategies and translation units employed by English learners in the process of translating Chinese cultural words.The think-aloud protocols in this research is applied to two aspects:the data collection and data analysis.40 senior English majors are asked as subjects, and an excerpt of 896 Chinese characters as a translated text. The subjects are expected to verbalize all they think as naturally and fully as they can while translating ST into TT, and at the same time record their own words with digital recorder. Each student finish their work individually in the process of data collection, the collected data is recording material. The recording material in turn are verbatim transcribed and marked into symbols designed preliminarily after the author keep on pre-listening seriously. The elicited data need to be selected and coded in accordance with the specific system in order to extract the elements of translation strategy used by the subjects in the translation process.Then, according to the experimental data, the English learners’ translation strategies are divided into learners’ problem-solving strategies and manipulation strategies. And the two kinds of strategies are respectively analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, so as to conclude that the whole translation process is considered as a retrospective-prospective nature. That’s, along with the use of some translation strategies, the subjects constantly seem to review, correct and even re-correct their translation until the students make sure the achievement of the ideal effect or eventually realize the untranslatability of ST.This study also makes statistics and integration of the translation strategies found in the experiment and the translation units mostly used by the subjects, and finally concludes five basic problem-solving strategies and five manipulation strategies used by English learners during translating Chinese cultural words. Finally, some suggestions are presented for future research on a similar nature.