A Study Of The Use Of Strategies In The Translation Of Negative Expressions In Business Contracts

This paper reports a psycho-linguistic study on the thinking process of five subjects in the given task of translating English negative expressions--at lexical,phrasal,and sentential levels--to Chinese.By means of the verbal protocol method,the author found that:(1)the following cognitive strategies were used in the translation process: repetition,clarification/verification,substitution,transfer,translation,guessing,grouping and resourcing and meta-cognitive strategies of selective attention,directed attention,self-evaluation,avoidance and self-monitoring.It was also found that the use of cognitive strategies was more frequent than that of meta-cognitive strategies.(2)Besides,the use of strategies showed obvious stage characteristics: The total number of strategies used in the translation of negative expressions at the sentential level was the largest.When translating the negative expressions at the lexical level,the subjects usually used strategies of guessing,clarification/verification,substitution,transfer and resourcing on the basis of the translation strategy;when translating the negative expression at the phrasal level,they mainly used strategies of substitution and transfer;when translating negative expressions at the sentential level,they tended to use strategies of translation,substitution and transfer on the basis of the reasoning strategy.(3)At the same time,there were significant individual variations in the use of cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies:On the whole,the total number of strategies used by the five subjects were different;respectively,we can find that the type of strategy in the translation of negative expressions at the three levels was also different for each one of the five subjects.