The translation of English phrases into Chinese necessitates adaptive strategies that aim to achieve functional rather than formal equivalence. These strategies have to be observed because of the extensive differences between Chinese and English syntax. Violation of this practice may result in compelled or stiff rendering. This article reports a study on the adaptive strategies taken by English majors to translate English phrases into Chinese. Participants included 50 juniors (Group A) and 48 freshmen (Group B) from a university. Group A had had experiences in translation and had completed courses such as Linguistic and Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English. In contrast, Group B had not received systemic training in translation and were just taking Linguistics during the research. Both groups were administrated a Test of English Phrase Translation which comprised 15 test questions. The questions were with literary stylistic features and thus called for adaptive measures that led to functional equivalence in renderings. The participants’ written responses were collected and analyzed using both the quantitative and qualitative paradigms. Descriptive statistics was conducted to pinpoint group frequency and percentage in applying an intended strategy for each question. An independent-samples t-test was then carried out to compare group means of the percentages. Qualitatively, item-by-item content analyses were observed to identify group responses and individual participants’ application of intended strategies. The result of t-test indicated no significant groups difference, suggesting absence of influence of translation experience and linguistics course training on strategy use. Qualitative analyses revealed that, as a whole, the groups were competent in using strategies such as shifting and conversion in the part of speech. They were less capable of using the strategies of amplification and omission and were unfamiliar with the strategy of division. Moreover, they were blocked from an effective use of the intended strategies largely due to their failure to grasp the heads and meanings of certain target phrases.