A Study On The Lexical Complexity Of Narrative Translation By English Major Learners

Vocabulary researches play an important role in language teaching.In recent decades,lexical complexity has drawn great attention by researchers and scholars.A large number of empirical studies have been conducted to find out whether correlations exist between writing quality and lexical complexity in written texts.Both translation and writing are written texts Based on the theories of the previous studies,the present study proposes the definition of lexical complexity with three dimensions(lexical sophistication,lexical density and lexical variation),attempting to explore relationships between lexical complexity and translation quality under the framework of the three dimensionsIn the present study,299 English learners participated in the experiment from a comprehensive university.The data were timed CE texts translated by these learners.This study intends to answer the three questions with the assistance of such tools as RANGE,LCA and SPSS.After analyzing the data with 9 indices from LCA,the results of this study are as follows 1.Students tends to use more basic or high frequency words(the first 1000)in their narrative translation tests.2.Chinese students’ translated texts gain a high lexical density,which shows that content words can account for a large percentage in narrative translations.In the lexical sophistication measures,lexical sophistication I(LS1)and lexical sophistication Ⅱ(LS2),do not differ greatly while corrected vsl(CVS1)gets the greatest fluctuation.Among lexical variation indices,number of different words(ND W)is generally high3.All indices in lexical variation and lexical sophistication show a high positive correlation with translation quality,while lexical density bears a negative relationship with translation qualityThe findings of the current study indicate students’ vocabulary use in translation and provide implications for English teaching,especially translation and vocabulary teaching.