Abstract:Relative clauses can be found in most human languages and they are a popular research topic in linguistics, psychology and other fields. Chinese and English, being two distinct languages, differ greatly in the syntactic structure of relative clauses. Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English relative clauses has long been research interest for applied linguists. The study on the translation strategies of relative clauses is of both practical and theoretical significance. When Chinese EFL learners translate relative clauses, there is a complex of adaptation that serves as an important function in rending from one language to another, which may lead to correct or incorrect answers, and here we term those as “translation strategies”. In this study, we investigated 90 high school students with similar English learning experience. In addition, 7 participants of similar background were invited to our think aloud task and interview. The research consists of: 1) a Chinese-English translation test; 2) an English-Chinese translation test; 3) a think aloud task and an interview to tap their way to comprehend and process, difficulties in the processing period and strategies to overcome the difficulties. The most frequently used strategies are found to be “translate according to the word order of Chinese” and “analyze the sentence structure and find out the matrix sentence first” in the Chinese-English translation task and “translate according to the word order of English” and “find out the noun phrase first, and then analyze the sentence structure” in the English-Chinese translation task, The findings from this study are quite enlightening to Chinese EFL learners when they are doing a translation task. The findings show that learners should strengthen their awareness of “analyze the sentence structure and then find out the matrix sentence”, since it is the most likely way to translate properly and efficiently.

Keywords: Relative clause; Translation; Strategies

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction.1

1.1 Introduction1

 1.2 Significance of the Study on Relative Clauses..1

Chapter 2 Literature Review3 

2.1 Relative Clauses.3

2.2 Major Hypotheses on the Difficulty Order of Different Relative Clauses3

   2.2.1 Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH)4

   2.2.2 Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH).5

   2.2.3 SO Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH)..5

2.3 Structural Differences between Chinese and English Relative Clause6

Chapter 3 Methodology.7

3. 1 Research Questions.7

3. 2 Participants...7

3.3 Elicitation Measure.7

   3.3.1 Translation Tasks.7

   3.3.2 Think Aloud Task7

   3.3.3 Interview.8

 3.4 Scoring...8

Chapter 4 Results and Discussion9

4. 1 Overall View.9

4.2 Think Aloud Task.10

4.3 Interview.11

  4.4 Chinese-English Translation Task.11

4.5 English-Chinese Translation Task.12

4.6 Summary12

Chapter 5 Conclusion.13

5.1 Findings of the Study.13

5.2 Pedagogical Implications13

5.3 Limitations of the Study..14

References15

Acknowledgements.16

Appendices17

Appendix 1 Chinese-English Translation Material17

Appendix 2 English-Chinese Translation Material18