On Chinglish in Chinese-English Translation and Its Countermeasures: Taking Translation of Modern Chinese Prose as an Example

Prose, containing colorful Chinese culture, is one of the most important treasures of Chinese literature. And in order to spread it abroad, the translation of it plays an indispensable role, because the good English version helps foreigners to understand more about Chinese culture. However, due to the different environments as well as thinking models between English and Chinese, translators are affected by the Negative Transfer, and couldn’t successfully transform their thinking patterns and thus bring about various kinds of Chinglish while in the practice of Chinese-English translation of prose. The subject of this paper is dozens of prose translations carefully completed by students’ cooperation in groups. On the basis that the translations are basically free of grammatical errors, the author explores Chinglish in those translations from the perspective of Negative Transfer, focusing on the main categories and causes of Chinglish at lexical and syntactic levels, and putting forward relative countermeasures.