Negative Lexical Transfer In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

Negative language transfer refers to the negative influence exerted by learners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than L2(target language)on their comprehension,production and learning of L2 pragmatic information.It can occur at phonetic level,lexical level,syntactical level,textual level and cultural level.While negative syntactical transfer and cultural transfer in interpreting are studied by considerable scholars,negative lexical transfer is studied by a few.Besides,negative lexical transfer,as a phenomenon that may occur in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting of interpreting trainees,is driven probably by many factors.For example,while in the press conferences following the two sessions of National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,"台湾问题"is officially interpreted as"the Taiwan issue"by the Department of Translation and Interpretation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,it’s still common that interpreting trainees sometimes interpret it as"the Taiwan problem".Such curtness in seeking word equivalence—in this case,interpreting"问题"into"problem"instead of more accurate yet effort-demanding choices like"issue"—is driven probably by a poor proficiency of the target language,comprehension failure of the source information or unbalanced coordination of effort.In looking for possible factors,this paper follows the Effort Model of Gile as this model explains factors affecting interpreting performance in all phases of interpreting.An empirical study on 24 trainee interpreters is conducted to explore the forms of negative lexical transfer in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting and then possible factors affecting negative lexical transfer according to Gile’s Effort Model.Both qualitative and quantitative analysis are used.The result can help trainee interpreters better identify their negative lexical transfer and the factors leading to the transfer.