An analysis of the translation of vocabulary lists in textbooks for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL)

Abstract

Recent research in the Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL) field has focused on the pedagogical perspectives underlying TCFL textbooks and their compilation. With the increasing interaction between China and other countries in global contexts such as culture, economics and commerce, there is a great need to expand research regarding all areas and issues within TCFL, especially in the important area of vocabulary and its translation in TCFL textbooks (Tsung and Cruickshank, 2011).

This research investigates a range of translation problems related to the accuracy of the vocabulary lists featured in 12 selected representative TCFL textbooks for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. This thesis presents findings from three triangulation cases (questionnaire survey, corpus research, and assessment test) involving two different groups of participants (e.g. Chinese teachers who completed the questionnaire survey and Chinese undergraduates majoring in English who underwent the assessment test). The contribution of this study is as follows: 1) I conduct a series of empirical evidence based on the viewpoints of practitioners regarding the identified translation problems to fill the gap that there are more descriptive and pedagogical works in the vocabulary translation of TCFL textbooks; 2) I adopt functional equivalence theory of translation and linguistics–based approaches (semantic, pragmatic and grammatical perspectives) to establish a theoretical framework which provides a flexible way of analysing translation and enables the original meanings of Chinese words to be analysed through various perspectives, especially for Chinese and English vocabulary analysis and translation; 3) I draw on translation quality evaluation theory to generate a translation quality evaluation framework which can serve as a reference point for other translation evaluation work regarding vocabulary conducted during other relevant studies; 4) I demonstrate that the majority of translation problems gathered from the selected TCFL textbooks were found at the preliminary level and in the content word class which have much practical relevance and research value for the pedagogical purpose of vocabulary teaching and translation; and 5) I build up a specific parallel corpus with passages and vocabulary lists of the selected TCFL textbooks.