An Analysis Of Errors In Englis Majors'C-E And E-C Translation From The Perspective Of Topic Structure

Topic structure is a universal phenomenon in languages, but it takes on different forms and characteristics in different languages. Different topic structure will bring about a great impact on sentence structure and it will exert significant influence on translation between the source language and the target language as well. The term of topic structure refers to any grammatical configuration consisting of two parts:the topic, which invariably occurs first, and the comment, a clause which follows the topic and says something about it. The theory of the thesis is based on the contrastive linguistics. By such a contrastive research, the author first hopes to get some ideas of Chinese and English topic structures, especially their wide differences, and then hopes to apply these finding to English learning. The methodology of the research is firstly to make a comparison between English topic structure and Chinese topic structure. Then two experiments of Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation about topic structures are carried out among 90 English majors of grade two in Xi'an International Studies University, Xi'an Technological University and Xijing University. The author designs two sets of translation test paper; each includes 20 sentences,10 sentences for Chinese-English translation and 10 for English-Chinese translation. The author distributes each translation test paper to 30 subjects respectively in three universities and asks them to finish the test paper with the given time. After that, the author collects and evaluates the test paper and gives a detailed analysis of errors made by English majors of grade two in three universities from the perspective of topic structures. By such a research, the author firstly wants to prove that topic structures have influence on Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation. Secondly, the author hopes it will give some implications for translation teaching and learning. Thirdly, the author firmly believes it will help Chinese learners of English get a better understanding of topic structure and make a successful learning in English.