母语负迁移在汉英翻译中的影响.doc

摘 要 英汉双语隶属于不同语系,，且在各方面存在极大不同。随着现今国内对翻译的逐步重视，英语言研究者将重点放在语言迁移方面。语言迁移可分为正迁移和负迁移。正迁移指的是母语和目的语的相同之处，且对目的语学习的促进作用。而负迁移则是，母语和目标语的不同之处，且对目标语学习进行干扰。在此情况下，译者在翻译过程中会受到母语影响。在翻译习作中，母语迁移显现尤为突出。本文主要分三个层次对汉英翻译中的母语负迁移现象进行探讨。关键词：负迁移; 汉英翻译; 干扰 i Table of ContentsAbstracti摘要ii1. Introduction12. Literature Review22.1 Language transfer studies abroad22.2 Language transfer studies in China23. Negative Transfer in Lexicon33.1 Difference in word structure between Chinese and English33.1.1 Constitution of Chinese at the lexical level33.1.2 Integrity of English at the lexical level34. Negative Transfer in Syntax54.1 Sentence Structure54.1.1 Integrality of the structure of a simple sentence54.1.2 Connection and cohesion in the structure of a complex sentence64.2 The tenses of finite verbs74.3 The forms of non-finite verbs74.4 The plural of nouns85. Negative Transfer in Discourse95.1 The restructuring of syntax95.2 Restructuring of syntactic order96. Strategies116.1 Suggestions for teachers116.2 Suggestions for learners117. Conclusion12References13Acknowledgements14 1. Introduction When it comes to foreign language study, we can often notice the influence of our mother tongue. It is easy to find that when a Chinese student speaks English, his or her English sounds like Chinese. Therefore, the influence of mother tongue called language transfer also have an effect on different levels of the other language, such as phonetics, phonology, semantics, discourse and syntax. Language transfer originated from psychology, which may be either positive or negative. Positive transfer is the facilitation by the mother tongue through similarities between the mother tongue and the target language; and negative transfer is interference by the mother tongue, resulting from the dissimilarities between the mother tongue and the target language. Recently, language transfer study, especially study on negative transfer, plays an important role in the field of linguistics in China. Negative transfer of mother tongue also prevails in Chinese-English translation practice. Scholars of linguistics have found that most of the linguistic errors in students translation products are results of the influence of Chinese and the effect of negative transfer at difference linguistic levels such as lexicon, semantics, and discourse. This thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter One introduces the definition and manifestation of language transfer. Chapter two provides a general review of the issue and the view points of linguists at home and abroad. Chapter Three is concerned with the negative transfer of mother tongue at the lexical level. Because of the cultural difference between China and the West, there is a big difference in word structure between their languages. Chapter Four, mainly deals with the grammatical errors at the syntactic level caused by language transfer. Chapter Five analyzes the errors made in the translation at discourse level. Chapter six provides some strategies drawn from the study for both English learners and teachers. The last chapter draws a conclusion.2. Literature Review2.1 Language transfer studies abroad Research on language transfer originated in the 1940s and 1950s. H. Ellis assumed that transfer is “the learning of Task A will affect the learning of Task B”. In the book Language Transfer in Language Learning by Selinker and Gass, there are at least 17 definitions of language transfer. Odlin offers his “working definition” of transfer in the book Language Transfer, which runs as follows: Transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired. Behaviorism predominated in the field of linguistics in early research. Based on that theory, second language acquisition (SLA) is a result of the old habits of the learners first language interfering with the new habits of second language. With this theory, Fries claims the greatest credit for comparing and contrasting the first and target languages, and as a result contrastive analysis was created. The importance of transfer has once again been acknowledged recently. Odlin (1989) comments that despite the counterarguments there is a large and growing body of research that indicates that transfer is indeed a very important factor in second language acquisition. (1989:4) There are a lot of factors that proved the phenomenon of language transfer in the studies of scholars were defined as structural factors and non-structural factors by Odlin (1989) 2.2 Language transfer studies in China The study of language transfer, especially negative transfer, has been increasing recently in China. Zhang Decong (1994) defines the negative transfer of mother tongue as the main factor leading to errors on the part of Chinese students in learning a second language caused by different cultures contained in Chinese and English. Dai Weidong and Wang Dong (2002) explore some basic problems caused by language transfer. Li Hong (2002) investigates the influence of the mother tongue on Chinese learners learning of English reflexive pronouns. Linguists have discovered that the negative transfer of mother tongue exerts influence on the translation practice of Chinese students. Chen Yunxiang (1997) suggests that the misinterpretation of the original lexicon is caused by the influence of Chinese at the lexical level. Empirically, Liao Fei (1998) and Chen Yuehong (1998) finds some evidence of syntactic transfer, showing the fact that the differences in syntactic structure between Chinese and English may result in the occurrence of negative transfer of the mother tongue. At the discourse level, the negative transfer of the mother tongue may result in errors in organizational pattern, which is illustrated in the study of Chen Bing (2003). 3. Negative Transfer in Lexicon3.1 Difference in word structure between Chinese and English English and Chinese are two remote and disconnected languages apart from their different written systems. They cannot always have one-to-one correspondences between their lexical semantics. As we all know, those errors are caused by the complex system of English grammar itself. One the other hand, they also result from the mother tongues influence. For these reasons, quite a lot of lexical errors in college students translation products are caused by English grammar. Nida (1993) points out that “in general the range of designative meaning of specific vocabulary is much more likely to be similar between languages, while the semantic ranges of generic vocabulary very frequently do not readily correspond”. For example, in both English and Chinese there are such corresponding specific words as “water” and “水”, “pine” and “松树”, “rabbit” and “兔子”, which can always be translated into each other, while the generic words “thing” and “东西” do not readily correspond: “他不是个好东西” cannot be translated into “He isnt a good thing”, but “He is a wicked creature”, and on the other hand, “The thing now is to see the president at once” is translated into “现在要做的事是立刻去见董事长” rather than “现在的东西是立刻去见董事长.”3.1.1 Constitution of Chinese at the lexical level Analytic language, also called isolating language, is a linguistic typology category. It is a language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio. In the extreme case of an isolating language or analytic language, words are composed of a single morpheme. This is different from synthetic languages, where words consist of multiple morphemes. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications such as fusional, agglutinative. Languages are said to lack morphology because none of its words has an internal compositional structure in word pieces, therefore, they would lack bound morphemes like affixes. Analytic languages use independent words while synthetic languages tend to use affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose. Chinese is a typical analytic language, especially classical Chinese. Comparing the Chinese lexicon to the English translation, errors may cause by insufficient knowledge and one-one correspondences thinking. For example, at the beginning of learning English, learners may translate “钱包” into “money bag ” not proper noun “purse”. Whats more, they often use incorrect word in translation practice that quote the gender of words out of the context. It is easy to make the errors in translation in using the Chinese way of thinking.3.1.2 Integrity of English at the lexical level English is an agglutinative language in general with each word having morphological changes to fulfill the functions of different parts of speech; while Chinese is an isolating language without any morphological changes. For example, native Chinese people often use “不” to explain the negative meaning of a word, such as “不值” (worthless), “不喜欢” (unlike), “不好” （bad）. Therefore, there are more than three ways to show the same negative meaning in English. In the above examples, “-less” is suffix, “un-” a prefix, and “bad” an independent word. Negative transfer of the mother tongue usually causes errors at the lexical level. Redundancy errors are the appearance of the unnecessary words in translation products of Chinese second language learners. That is to say, some words have no useful function in a sentence, which need to be edited out. In translation practice, to show the negative meaning of a word “important”, native speakers choose the correct prefix “un-” unconsciously; while Chinese learners may confuse the difference between “in-”, “un-” and other morphemes . 4. Negative Transfer in Syntax 4.1 Sentence structure All the languages in the world can be divided in two groups: synthetic and analytic. Chinese is a typical analytic language which expresses grammatical meaning by word order and function words rather than morphological change. And English is both synthetic and analytic. In an analytic language, words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance. Chinese always use word order to show subjectobject relationships. According to studies, which say Mandarin Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. At the syntactical level, English is a language with more prepositions and nouns, and Chinese is one with more verbs. Chinese has not any inflectional change of word or change of tense and mood; while English is characterized by inflectional change to express grammatical relationships. It should be noted that Chinese and English have different sentence structures respectively. Chinese is a topic-prominent language, where word order usually follows a conceptual and temporal sequence. In the Chinese way of thinking, the subjects of action and behavior are made by human beings, especially in classical Chinese. Therefore, Chinese people choose a person or creature as the subject of a sentence. However, English has a strict rule of subject-predicate structure, in which an inanimate subject with an animate verb is widely used. For these reasons, negative transfer is easily caused in translation practice for language learners, which most prominently occurs in tense, voice and mood. In Chinese，most sentences are periodic sentences in which the most important information like judgment or deduction is usually put at the end of a sentence. But English is different from Chinese. Most English sentences are loose sentences，in which the sentence stress may occur at the very beginning. 4.1.1 Integrality of the structure of a simple sentenceBased on the studies of linguists, the majority of human languages share the VSO, SVO, or SOV patterns as their basic word orders. Moreover, both English and Chinese have an SVO order. In Palmbergs (1976) study, numerous errors in English word order have been found in a guided composition task performed by native speakers of Finish, a flexible SVO language.There are five basic English verb patterns, which are subject+intransitive verb, subject+transitive verb+object, subject+dative verb+the indirect object+the direct object, subject+link verb+ predicative, subject+transitive verb+object+object complement. What is more, the subject of an imperative sentence is often omitted, but it is still a complete sentence. That is to say native Chinese learners of English may get confused about the word order of English grammar. On the other hand, compared with Chinese, the sentence structure of English is integral and may cause negative transfer of mother tongue in translating. For example, (1) 如果这个问题不解决，势必影响两国的利益。Wrong: If the problem is not solved, inevitably affect the relations between two countries.Right: Failure to settle this issue is bound to impair the relations between the two countries seriously.Comparing these two versions, we can find that the first one is wrong in that the main clause lacks a subject. This error is the result of a direct imitation of the original Chinese structure. The second one uses as its subject “failure to settle this issue”, the nominalization of the clause “if one fails to settle this issue”, and then the rest of the sentence is made into the predicate, which is a typically English way of expression. What is more, native Chinese learners of English often make mistakes in gender, tense, voice and number in translating practice, because of the mother tongues influence. 4.1.2 Connection and cohesion in the structure of a complex sentence The word order shows the connection between words in Chinese. For example, a descriptive word before a noun is an adjective; if it follows the noun it becomes a predicate. And there may also be mistakes in the translation of native Chinese learners of English because of their confusion of gender and number inflections for subject and object pronouns. Complex sentences of Chinese have more than two clauses, which may be explicitly linked by conjunctions or implicitly by logic. For example, “明天不下雨，我们上山去”， “河不深，可是水太冷”, the two clauses in the first sentence are implicitly linked by the logic that exists between a future action and its weather condition. And the second sentence uses the conjunction “可是”, which is the mark of an adversative relation.In English, clauses in a complex sentence must be explicitly connected one way or another. In translation practice, it is important to find the logical linking and distinguish the sort of complex sentence and link up the clauses by grammatical means.(2) 我访问了一些地方，遇到了不少人，要谈起来，奇妙的事儿可多着呢。 Badly connected: I visited some places and met some people. It has many