Cause Analysis On Chinglish

As a world language, English has been used widely across the world in thecontext of accelerated globalization. This has inevitably pressed China toincreasingly focus on English language learning, which is made popular nationalwide. English courses are offered from primary schools to universities andEnglish is prevailingly set as a required course in junior and senior high schools,being almost treated as a premier foreign language and a core way to measurethe overall competence of a student. Besides, English is frequently seen inChinese advertisements, newspapers, daily communications and street signs. Asa result, Chinese people’s English language proficiency has been noticeablyimproved, which in turn has considerably helped China in its communicationwith the world and image reframing.However, in this English-for-all drive, a peculiar phenomenon shows up:the English that Chinese people use is inconsistent with the Normative Englishspoken by native English speakers. Such Chinese variety of English, Chinglishas scholars in the world call, is confusing and misleading in China’scommunication with the world. Scholars agree that Chinglish is nonsensicalEnglish, which impedes inter-personal communication, so they appeal tominimize or ban the use of it. Under this circumstance, scholars have done a lotof researches concerning Chinglish covering its definitions, manifestations,theoretical foundations, causes and solutions.Previous researches on the causes of Chinglish were engaged in nothingmore than abstract subjects such as differences in culture and the way ofthinking between Chinese and English native speakers. It is believed thatChinglish is the result of native language interference. This paper aims to findout the causes of Chinglish in a more comprehensive perspective by classifyingthe widely-discussed factors in culture and the way of thinking as objective causes of Chinglish and other factors as subjective factors which are connectedclosely with language users. Such diagnosis of Chinglish in both objective andsubjective perspectives can help to treat the symptoms and the causes as well.In consideration to the fact that previous researches on Chinglish usuallywere based on static written materials as research data and very few dynamicmaterials related to the generating process of Chinglish have been used, thispaper integrates both static and dynamic materials for an in-depth probe into thecauses of Chinglish with an empirical research approach supported by a largenumber of data collected from undergraduates in their in-class performance ofChinese-English translation assignments. The research results out of the datafrom both quantitative and qualitative approaches may help to offercorresponding solutions for minimizing or eliminating the use of Chinglish.