Abstract: Language transfer has been a controversial topic in the second language acquisition within the last few decades; its importance in foreign language learning has been reassessed several times. Language transfer can be classified into positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer is beneficial to the second language learning, while negative transfer is the interference of the mother tongue. As a process involving the shift of bilingual information, translation process is, in particular, constrained by the phenomenon of negative transfer. The negative transfer of mother tongue is very salient in Chinese-English translation in that the two languages do not have much in common because of their different origins. As vocabulary is of paramount importance to a language, its successful learning and mastery will have a direct impact on the second language learning. Therefore, based on the Language Transfer theory, by means of contrastive analysis and error analysis, the study is an effort to explore the transfer problem at lexical level in the English majors’ Chinese-English translation. And all the data analyzed in the paper are collected from the 62 translation papers. |
