Eye Movement Contrast On The Sight Translation Of Garden Path Sentences In Chinese College English Learners And Its Classroom Teaching Design

As China's international influence expands,improving college students' English translation knowledge and abilities is attracting much more attention.Therefore,translation teaching research is particularly important.At present,the researches on Chinese-English translation teaching are developing rapidly,and the number of empirical research in exploring the cognitive processing process of translators is limited,and the researches on translation teaching of garden path sentence are rare.Since the term "garden path" was proposed by T.G.Bever in 1970,it has attracted widespread attention of scholars at home and abroad.Garden path sentence is a phenomenon in which people have temporary difficulty in understanding and the sentence can cause partial ambiguity in a certain part of the sentence in the process of people's cognitive processing.So far,no empirical research has been found on the use of eye-movement technology to investigate the garden path sentences from the perspective of sight translation.Based on the review of research results on garden path sentences,eye movement research in linguistics,and translation teaching research at home and abroad,this study adopts eye-movement technology and selects the freshmen of non-English majors,the freshmen and juniors of English translation majors,35 people each.This study uses three-factor mixed design,3(subjects' English levels: low,medium,high)×3(aspects: lexis,syntax,pragmatics)×2(sentence types: garden path sentence,non-garden path sentence).This study aims to investigate the cognitive processing differences between learners of different English levels on different aspects of garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences.The main findings of the study are as follows: Firstly,learners of different English levels have significant differences in sight translation performance and eye movement indexes on garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences at the same aspects.In the process of translating garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences,high level learners have higher sight translation scores than low and medium level learners,and their first run dwell time and second run dwell time are also shorter than those of low and medium level learners.On the pragmatic aspect of garden path sentences,the dwell time of high level learners is significantly longer than that of medium level learners.In addition,when translating garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences,low level learners lag behind higher level learners in terms of sight translation performance and various eye movement indexes.Secondly,there are significant differences in the sight translation performance and eye movement indexes between different aspects' garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences of the learners at the same English level.Learners of the same English level have the highest scores on the garden path sentence at the syntactic aspect,and the dwell time and fixation counts of thesyntactic aspect are higher than the lexical and pragmatic aspects as well.At the first run dwell time and second run dwell time,the garden path sentence at the lexical aspect is the shortest,and the garden path sentence at the pragmatic aspect is significantly the longest.On non-garden path sentences,the sight translation performance at the lexical aspect is better than that of the syntactic and pragmatic aspects,and all eye movement indexes at the lexical aspect are higher than those of the syntactic and pragmatic aspects,while the pragmatic aspect is opposite.Thirdly,learners at the same English level have significantly different sight translation performance and eye movement indexes on the same aspects of garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences.The learners have higher sight translation performance in the non-garden path sentences than in the garden path sentences,and garden path sentences' dwell time and fixation counts are both shorter than those of garden path sentences.In addition,low level learners spend more time in the non-garden path sentences than in the garden path sentences at first run dwell time and second run dwell time.Based on the main research findings and the ADDIE instructional design model,this study writes the classroom instructional design for the translation of English garden path sentences which relates to the juniors of English translation majors and the freshmen of non-English majors,in order to provide thoughts and enlightenments for college English teachers in the instructional design and strategies of complex sentences.The significance of this study includes two points.Theoretically,this study provides the theoretical basis for college English teachers in the aspects of the teaching methods of sight translation in the garden path sentences and translation practical training methods to students of different English level.In practice,for students of low English level,this study helps them recognize the advantages of high level translators in translation strategies,so as to reflect on their own shortcomings and promote their translation abilities.For teachers,this study plays an important role in helping them deeply understand the cognitive differences of students at different English levels when translating garden path sentences,it is also instructive to the pedagogical practice of English complex sentence translation.