This study is aimed at observing conceptual transfer of Chinese Korean learners through back-translation, especially focusing on principles of organizing sentences. The use of back-translation in foreign language education is effective in identifying ...
This study is aimed at observing conceptual transfer of Chinese Korean learners through back-translation, especially focusing on principles of organizing sentences. The use of back-translation in foreign language education is effective in identifying the learner's error and its cause through the transition from the target language to the native language and from the native language to the target language.
Chinese has the characteristic of implicitly linking logic when constructing sentences. In other words, the comma (,), the semicolon (;), and the colon (:) alone are enough to reveal the meaning without using connective endings or conjunctions that indicate the meaning between the sentence fragments.
In other words, Chinese learners use CS1 to complete sentences in their language when translating from Korean to Chinese. When translating into Korean again, CS1 and CS2 should be used properly and CS2 should be used where necessary. However, there is still a part of the conceptual transfer that has been influenced by CS1 because of the failure of reconstruction to CS2.
In this paper, comparing the back-translation of the test subjects with the original text, it is not as perfect as the original, but there is no problem in understanding. In other words, it can be viewed as ‘a difference that does not matter’. However, as the experimental text was selected as the expository writing, the logical linkage and cohesion were considered as important criteria in sentence construction. Therefore, if the translation was unreasonable or poorly condensed, the original text could not be delivered properly.
On the basis of criteria, the conceptual errors are classified as 1) missing error, 2) response error, and 3) replacement error. And the cause of these errors was found in the Chinese translation.
First of all, the missing error is the case of back-translation without using the connective endings and the demonstratives in the original Korean text. When looking only at the translation, it can be figured out what the sentence is trying to say. However, since it misses connective endings or demonstratives, it fails to convey the meaning of the original text properly.
Next, response error is when the response between the subject, object, and predicates is inappropriate. Previous studies have only revealed that learners do not properly use subjective, objective postpositions or passive verbs, but the reasons have not been clarified. However, this paper is meaningful in that it is a conceptual transfer due to the Chinese non-explicit logical linkage.
Lastly, the replacement error is a case where the connective endings used in the original Korean text is replaced with another connective endings, so that its meaning is not properly transferred, or the verb is replaced with a noun to create ungrammatical sentences. In particular, it should be noted that since Chinese speakers use a lot of commas, it is customary to use the Korean connective ending ‘-고’ when converting commas into Korean sentences.
According to analysis above, Chinese speakers have difficulty in properly connecting comma-separated sentences, but this is not because they do not know Korean vocabularies or grammar. Instead, Chinese speakers do not try to construct sentences logically because commas are enough to convey their meaning.
This paper is meaningful because it examined the conceptual transfer which was not covered in previous studies through back-translation, and found the reason in the non-explicit logical linkage of Chinese language.