Abstract: Language transfer has been a controversial topic in the second language acquisition within the last few decades; its importance in foreign language learning has been reassessed several times. Language transfer can be classified into positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer is beneficial to the second language learning, while negative transfer is the interference of the mother tongue. As a process involving the shift of bilingual information, translation process is, in particular, constrained by the phenomenon of negative transfer. The negative transfer of mother tongue is very salient in Chinese-English translation in that the two languages do not have much in common because of their different origins. As vocabulary is of paramount importance to a language, its successful learning and mastery will have a direct impact on the second language learning. Therefore, based on the Language Transfer theory, by means of contrastive analysis and error analysis, the study is an effort to explore the transfer problem at lexical level in the English majors’ Chinese-English translation. And all the data analyzed in the paper are collected from the 62 translation papers.
Key Words: Negative transfer; second language acquisition; mother tongue; Chinese-English translation; vocabulary

摘  要：在过去几十年里，母语负迁移一直是二语习得领域颇有争议的话题，人们对其在外语教学领域的认识几经反复。语言迁移可以分为正迁移和负迁移，正迁移有利于第二语言的学习，而负迁移是指母语对目的语学习的干扰作用。翻译是双语信息转换的过程，尤其会受到语言负迁移的影响。汉语和英语属于两种完全不同的语系，因此它们之间没有太多相似之处，从而导致汉英翻译中往往有明显的母语负迁移现象。词汇是语言的重要组成部分，成功掌握词汇知识对第二语言的学习有直接影响。本文以语言迁移理论，对比分析和错误分析为理论基础，以英语专业学生的翻译习作为研究语料，从词汇角度探讨中国英语专业学生的译文中出现的负迁移现象。 
关键词：负迁移；二语习得；母语；汉英翻译；词汇