English ergative verbs have been identified as posing great difficulties for L2 learners including native-Chinese speaking translators, whose translations from Chinese into English are considered a special form of interlanguage. This study looks at the pattern of native Chinese speaking translators in their use of ergative verbs when translating Chinese editorials into English. A small translation corpus has been built consisting of 120 translations from four groups of translators of different translation and English language competence levels. This study reveals that the native-Chinese speaking translators produce significantly fewer ergative verbs than the native-English speaking translators. The study suggests that the production of ergative verbs in translation is correlated with the translator's competence level and the typological language differences between Chinese and English.
