Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
The communication between countries is inevitable in the background ofinternationalization, no matter in humanity, society or technology. And English, as themain language of international communication, plays an important role. In China, theschool education is the main way to learn English for youth, and accordingly, collegesalso take essential responsibility to cultivate students’ English abilities. As for theabilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing, the college English syllabus givesits requirements and it involves translation ability as well (its general ability istranslating Chinese to English and English to Chinese in familiar topic with the helpof dictionaries, the speed of translating Chinese to English should be about 250Chinese characters per hour while the speed of English to Chinese translation shouldbe about 300 English words, and the translated text ought to be basically accurate andno major errors). In addition, Chinese-English translation, as a new pattern, has beenadded in CET-4 and CET-6. It requires examinees to translate Chinese into Englishand the number of characters must be between 140 and 160 in CET-4. What’s more,the skill of translating plays an important role in interpersonal communication, whichis necessity in English learning. Nevertheless, students are not skilled at dealing withthis kind translation and many unexpected errors occur in their translation andtherefore it is necessary to make a research on the errors of non-English majors’Chinese-English translation. According to that, this thesis focuses on studying theerrors in non-English majors’ Chinese-English translation.
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1.2 Significance and Purposes of the Study
As what has been said above, there are many errors in students’ translationexercises, thus this research is designed to analyze the errors in non-English majors’ Chinese-English translation. Through analyzing non-English majors’ Chinese-Englishtranslation, this study tries to find out what kinds of errors do the students often make,the factors that cause those errors, the frequency of each kind, what difficultiesstudents face in the middle of translating and the implications we can get from thisresearch. In addition, this study may attract the attention of teachers and learners toChinese-English translation to some extent. And this research can initiate teachers tofind appropriate measures to help students reduce such errors.As to this topic, error analysis, a number of linguists have studied for many yearsand they have also got achievements theoretically. This issue has three greatsignificances to language learning and teaching.“First to the teacher, in that they tell him, if he undertakes a systematic analysis,how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and, consequently, what remainsfor him to learn. Second, they provide to the researcher evidence of how language islearnt or acquired, what strategies or procedures the learner is employing in hisdiscovery of the language. Thirdly (and in a sense this is their most important aspect)they are indispensable to the learner himself, because we can regard the making oferrors as a device the learner uses in order to learn. It is a way the learner has oftesting his hypotheses about the nature of the language he is learning” (Corder, 1967).
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Researches on Error Analysis (EA) at Home and Abroad
Error analysis theory turned up in late 1960s. Before that, scholars generallyemployed contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) to analyze the learners’ errors in theprocess of learning and teaching, which mainly explains learners’ error and its causesby comparing between the target language and mother tongue. And another functionof it is to predict learners’ errors to some extent.With the development of linguistics and the appearance ofChomsky's transformational and generative grammar (T-G Grammar), it found thecontrastive analysis theory was i
