A Study of Influence of Different Translation Aids on Chinese EFL Majors’ Construal of the Original in C-E Translation

Abstract

The student-translator’s construal of the original informs his expression in translation, and their construal construction depends partly on various translation aids. Applying the four-dimension construal analysis framework of Cognitive Linguistics to analyzing the relevant experiment results, the study finds that compared with paper dictionaries, internet resources are more helpful in some ways to undergraduate Chinese EFL majors as C-E student-translators in construal of the Chinese original, thus more significant to them. As far as these learner-translators are concerned, the former can be more instrumental for their construal of the original in scope and specificity, reflected particularly in that the former can help them obtain their needed encyclopedic and specialized information to a greater extent. The two different aids do not produce noticeable difference in their prominence choice and their translation of the original expressions which require much creativity. In perspective, though there exists remarkable difference between the two groups of translators, this difference seems to have little to do with the different translation aids. It is also suggested thereby that more pedagogic efforts should be made to develop the learner-translators’ ability to apply translation technology in using internet resources as translation aids for better performance in C-E translation.