On Compiling Translator-competence-centered Pragmatic Translation Textbooks For ESL Undergraduates

The increasing demand of pragmatic translation talents is raising a higher requirement for the construction of pragmatic translation textbooks. However, this kind of textbooks is far from satisfying the needs in pragmatic translation teaching. Additionally, the relevant studies are too limited and deprived of systematic and in-depth discussions.The thesis proposes developing translator-competence-centered pragmatic translation textbooks after analyzing the status quo of pragmatic translation teaching of English majors and the gap between the present translation teaching and the market demand for translators.The author finds out that the existing translation textbooks overemphasize the conversion and contrastive analysis between two languages, but fail to integrate translation theory with translation practice and give no explicit training objectives. Firstly, according to the requirements for training translation talents stipulated in Teaching Syllabus of English majors in higher institutions and an analysis on the features of pragmatic translation as well as a questionnaire investigation, the author believes that pragmatic translation textbooks should focus on improving students' translator competence. Secondly, the author proposes six principles that should be followed for compiling translator-competence-centered pragmatic translation textbooks after analyzing the popular course design model in translation teaching, namely, emphasizing translation practice, being under the macroscopic guidance of translation theories, keeping up with the time, absorbing theories from other disciplines, highlighting the cultural awareness and taking market as the orientation.Last, the thesis proposes several suggestions for constructing translator-competence-centered pragmatic translation textbooks. First, functionalist translation theories should be introduced into the compilation of pragmatic translation textbooks, for such theories of text type, translation skopos, translational action, etc. proposed by functionalist translation theorist are closely related to pragmatic translation. Second, multiple translation tasks (mainly pedagogical translation tasks and real- world translation tasks) should be integrated with translator-competence-centered pragmatic translation textbooks, which enables the students to be aware of all the possibilities in translation practice and thus is more helpful to the improvement of their translator competence. Only by doing so, can the translators trained meet the need of the market. The present research also provides some new thoughts for translation teaching practice and facilitates the construction of translatology.