Translation Asymmetry in Korean Middle School Students Learning English

Abstract

This study examines the questions of (a) how the beginning English level of Korean middle school students make use of lexical and conceptual memory in translation and (b) whether the processing and representations involved in both directions are predicted by the revised hierarchical model (RHM), one of the influential models in L2 and bilingual lexical processing. Through a text-translation task and a word recognition task, the results supported the claims of the RHM, demonstrating that the young participants yielded more errors in the L1 to L2 translation than the reverse, and that they were more likely to mistakenly choose synonymous words when they translated from L1 to L2. The findings suggest that the beginning L2 learners are more likely to be semantically and conceptually involved in the L1-L2 translation than in the reverse direction, consistent with the asymmetrical aspect of the RHM.