Translation Strategies Adopted By High-score Group And Low-score Group Of English Majors In Translation Process

The traditional translation studies has been mainly concerned with translation as a product, while ignore the study of translation as a process. However, since 1980s, there has been an increasing tendency in the interest of empirical research into translation process. Some scholars have put forward the suggestion that it should be possible to unveil the"black box"in translation process by means of think-aloud used in cognitive psychology, and have conducted experiments to test this hypothesis.This thesis carries out an experiment to explore the translation processes of the Chinese student translators when they fulfill the English -Chinese translation tasks. The focus of the study is to investigate the translation strategies and translation units the students adopted in the translation process. In order to find out the differences and similarities of the strategies and units adopted between the two group students, think-aloud method is used to collect the data from participants'self-reporting of their mental process. The participants of the present study are the forth-year (Grade 4) English majors of Xinjiang Normal University. They are asked to translate the same text and to verbalize everything that went through their mind while translating. Ten students are selected as the subjects form the 30 participants based on the product of their translation and the protocols. The 10 students are evenly divided into two groups: the High-score group and Low-score group. The data collected from the experiment are then coded in two coding systems, i.e. the Strategy Coding System and the Unit of Translation Coding System. The coded TAPs are then analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The major findings of the present study are as following:1) Both of the two group students employ all the seven strategies and their sub-strategies proposed by Gerloff during the process of ST reading and TT production.2) The most frequently strategies used by the two group students are: General Search and Selection, Problem Identification, Editing or Monitoring of TT Segment, which takes about half of the seven strategies. This result shows that ST reading comprehension and TT production seem to be the focus in the translation process of the participants.3) However, the quantity of the Low-score students'usage of strategy is a little higher than that of the High-score students', which indicates that the Low-score students coming across more problems in the process of translation, thus there being more cognitive movement occurred. What's more, the Low-score students find more problems in lexical level, thus they use more local strategies such as general search and selection, while the High-score student adopt more global strategies such as inferencing and reasoning. Actually speaking, these global strategies includes abstracting the main idea of the source text, detecting coherence clues to establish logical relations between elements of the text, making connection with paragraph or even larger context, and retrieving world knowledge to facilitate comprehension. To sum up, the High-score students use more global strategies whereas the Low-score students adopted more local ones.4) As for the unit of translation, the Low-score students mainly use word as translation unit while the High-score students mainly use phrase and sentence as translation unit. The results indicate that both of the two group students'translation units tend to be smaller and shorter.