Theapplication Of Markedness Theory To Translation Quality Assessment In Translation Teaching

For a long time translation quality assessment (TQA) has been a problem bothering translation teachers. When analyzing the source text and assessing the target text, teachers usually carry out from two dimensions,"faithfulness"and"smoothness", such as how to comprehend the source text accurately, whether the language is appropriate and conforms to the idiomatic expressions, whether the target text has been expressed naturally and smoothly, and whether the stylistic characteristic of the source text has been reproduced, and so on; in comparing two versions of translation, they would like to do the same way. As a matter of fact to point out errors is the commonplace. For a particular translation practice teaching, teachers often adopt a"practice ---- analysis and explanation (error picking) ---- reference offering"mode, in which the analyzing, assessing and feedback approach are certainly subjective and vague and brings about the singleness of the corresponding teaching form. As a result, the students often consider that translation ability is not easy to be promoted and that it is not worth practicing much. Eventually their initiative and enthusiasm in class learning and after-class practicing are greatly influenced, contradictory with the feature of translation and the aim of translation teaching.Therefore, this thesis attempts to apply a comparatively objective and specific TQA approach to translation teaching, raising a MT-based TQA and teaching approach to avoid the students'randomness when analyzing ST and assessing their own translation works and help them aware their defects of their works and ultimately help them promote their translation abilities.The attempt is developed from two aspects:First, in the teaching practice of some particular translation practice, teachers can experience two stages (in-class stage and after-class stage) or seven steps. In-class stage covers ST analysis, ST markedness, skills introduction and TT markedness; after-class stage is the consummation of in-class stage, including students'first translating, assessment and feedback, and students'retranslating.Second, in the special process of assessment and feedback, teachers can follow two circumstances: one is to offer a descriptive assessment in the light of PMEP and examine the equivalence of the marked items between the ST and TT; the other is to give a scoring assessment according to the Numerical Effect Value (NEV) calculation in translation tests.To test the reliability and validity of MT-based TQATA, the author first resort literature review covering the current studies of MT and TQA, some translation theories and some teaching and learning theories, then moves on to carry out an empirical study. First, she picks out two classes as subjects (one is as EC and the other is as CC) which are the juniors with approximately the same TEM-4 records. The EC is taught by the MT-based TQA and teaching approach whereas the CC by traditional approach with typical feature of error picking and vogue assessment. During the teaching of a semester, a pre-test, a class observation, an interview, and a post-test are carried out, and the collected data of pre-test and post-test are compared and analyzed.The results of the experiment show that the mean score of the post-test of the EC is clearly higher than that of the pre-test, and although the CC also gets a higher mean score than its pre-test, the EC gets a much greater increase than the CC. Meanwhile, the students show more interest and greater enthusiasm in translation learning and practice.Therefore we come to conclude that: the application of MT to translation teaching with ST analysis, TT assessment and test scoring in the light of PMEP and NEV calculation helps to improve students'translation abilities and arouse their enthusiasm to learn and practice.At last the author summarizes the shortcomings of this study and makes suggestions for further studies.