Effects Of Translation Continuation Task On The Chinese-English Translation Of Government Initiative By Chinese Undergraduates

As a bridge of communication between different cultures,translators are bound to play an important role in various fields.The effectiveness of translation teaching is crucial to the cultivation and improvement of students' English translation ability.However,there are few empirical studies on how to enhance the efficiency of translation teaching in China.At the same time,most researchers take literary texts as the research material,and the research on the teaching of practical stylistic translation is not sufficient.In order to improve students' translation ability,Wang(2016)proposed the method of translation continuation as a practical application of the extension hypothesis.Extension promotes the intersection of understanding and output.What is understood is the expression from others,and what is produced is the immediate self-creation after the comprehension.Production and comprehension have a leveling effect in the interaction due to their difference,thus facilitating learners to learn the expressions and structures produced by others.The language leveling effect of translation continuation is quite obvious,so it could be a good choice to cultivate translation skills(Wang 2016).Most empirical studies about the extension hypothesis focus on the alignment effect of continuation of writing,neglecting cognitive process underlying translation continuation task.To date,only two studies have been conducted on translation continuation in China(e.g.,Xu 2016;Wang 2018).Based on the above background,the current study aims to explore the effect of translation continuation task on Chinese undergraduates' Chinese-English translation of government initiative.Three research questions are proposed:(1)are there any aligned language structures in terms of words,phrases and sentences in the experimental group's Chinese-English translation?(2)does the experimental group commit fewer errors and achieve higher scores in translation continuation tasks of Chinese-English translation?(3)if there is alignment in translation continuation tasks,does it have any delayed effects?To answer the research questions,24 freshmen from a class of English majors in a university in Guangzhou were randomly divided into two groups – a experimental group and a control group with 12 students in each group.The experiment lasted for three weeks and consisted of three tests.These two groups took the test at the same time in the same classroom weekly.In the first test,the experimental group carefully read the pre-reading materials in both Chinese and English of the first passage in 20 minutes while the control group read the pre-reading materials in Chinese in 20 minutes.Then they translated the subsequent part of the passage into English in 30 minutes.In the second and the third week,they all translated the second and third passages into English in 30 minutes.While the two groups carried out translation tasks,they were also required to provide verbal reports.Based on data analysis,the following findings are obtained.(1)In the task of translation continuation,aligned language structures,in terms of words,phrases and sentence structures,did exist in the translation with the pre-reading material in Chinese and English,because in the three tests,the experimental group used significantly more repeated words and phrases than the control group.Also,there was a significant difference in the frequencies of the use of sentence patterns between the two groups in the first test.(2)Translation continuation tasks are helpful to improve the translation performance because the experimental group made significantly fewer lexical errors in the three tests,fewer morphological errors in the first and the second tests and fewer syntactic errors in the first test.Additionally,in the first test,the experimental group achieved significantly better scores in translations.(3)However,the delayed effect of translation continuation is not evident because no significant difference in the morphological and syntactic errors was found between the two groups in the third test and in the scores in the second and third tests.These results have provided affirmative answers for the three research questions.Overall,the translation continuation of the present study had strong immediate alignment effect,but the delayed effect was limited.The findings of the study suggest that the translation continuation task is conducive to improve Chinese-English translation quality,an effective translation teaching method with strong operability to improve learners' translation performance.