The developmental pattern of lexical consultation by Chinese students in translation into English

Abstract

This empirical study looks into Chinese students' lexical consultation in translation into English from a developmental perspective. It aims to examine the effect of lexical consultation on translation at different levels of competence, the characteristics of lexical consultation at different levels, and the causes of unsuccessful consultation. Results showed that lexical consultation produced a net positive effect on translation, which was achieved largely through improvement in expressing source-text meaning and marginally through improvement in collocation and language quality. This "meaning-dominated" distribution was found a recurrent pattern in zero and negative effects as well as in the lexical problems addressed, solved and left unsolved. With increasing competence, a decline was found in lookup-induced modification, zero-effect consultation, failed attempt to correct lexical errors, and failure rate of consultation. The study of between-level differences revealed that while there was a gradual decrease in the number of meaning- and language-related problems from the novice to the advanced level, the proportion of meaning- and collocation-related problems remained similar among the three groups. The observation of the lookup process found that informants from higher levels displayed more desirable consultation features, such as perseverance in lexical search, greater research depth and larger working units, whereas those from lower levels had more naive lexical assumptions, such as one-to-one lexical correspondence and overgeneralization of the restricted and conditional cross-language equivalence. In the study of the causes of failed consultation, faulty moves were detected in each of the main lookup steps, such as selecting inappropriate problem words, only seeking literal correspondence, misusing appropriate items, etc. Behind such moves was the neglect of certain properties of the lexical item, reflected in some empty space in the internal structure of the entry. Two major contributory factors to consultation failures were the duplication of certain properties from the Chinese translation equivalent to the English item, and the misunderstanding of the original instantial or metaphorical meaning. The above results defined the effect of lexical lookup on translation, described the development of the translator's consultation, and identified the causes of consultation failures. With these findings, the present research enhanced the understanding of lexical consultation in translation, contributing to the study of translation process and of development of translation competence. This project also made contribution to translation training by proposing some practical recommendations concerning how to improve the learners' lexical consultation ability. Moreover, combining three models from different disciplines, this thesis established a theoretical framework for studying the translator's lexical consultation. While highlighting the translation activity as the context of lexical consultation, this new framework provides effective instrument to describe and analyze the lookup process as well as the consultation results, thus enabling more systematic exploration into lexical consultation in translation.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English