A Study On Language Errors Of CET-6 Chinese-English Translation Based On Error Analysis Theory

In December 2013,the newest reformed CET-6 was conducted.The translation question type was changed from sentence-translation to passage-translation,focusing on candidate’s comprehensive language application ability.After the reform,the scores of the C-E translation are much lower than before,which reflects many problems in the college English translation teaching.The research on translation samples can clearly identify students’ error-prone aspects and the insufficiency of college translation teaching,put forward feasible suggestions to enhance the teaching effects of college English translation teaching and improve students’ translation competence.With EA as theoretical basis,the study analyzes 74 students’ CET-6 C-E translation samples through text analysis,case analysis and semi-structure interview.The 74 non-English major undergraduates are randomly selected from Xi’an International Studies University,Northwest University,Shaanxi Normal University,Xianyang Normal University and Xidian University.The study mainly proceeds from two aspects.Firstly,based on the errors categorization of Carl James,the study identifies and classifies language errors into three types,namely substance errors,text errors and discourse errors.It tends to statistic the frequencies and distributions of error types and find out the most-frequent one as well as the correlation coefficients of them.For the second aspect,the translation samples are divided into high-score,middle-score and low-score groups based on the normal distribution of their scores,which aims to analyze the strongest predictors of translation scores in three groups by multiple regression analysis.As the analysis results indicate(1)text error is the most-frequent,which contains grammar error and lexical error.Furthermore,the grammar error occupies almost half of total errors;(2)The strongest correlation exists between grammar error and lexical error;(3)In low-score group,the strongest predictor of translation scores is substance error;in middle-score group,discourse error is the strongest predictor;and in high-score group,the strongest predictor is text error.Based on the major findings,three contrastive suggestions have been proposed:(1)Teachers should train students’ grammatical competence and vocabulary accumulation by translation practices;(2)Grammar and vocabulary should be taught together.(3)In personalized teaching,teachers should instruct basic knowledge to low-level students;cultivate middle-level students’ proficiency in creating complex sentence and coherence discourse;and develop the high-level students’ ability of using advanced vocabulary flexibly.