A Study On The Undergraduate Translation Program Based On Translation Competence

Since the Ministry of Education approved the establishment of translation major in the first three institutions of higher education in2006, the whole country has witnessed the mushrooming of the budding discipline. Up until March,2011,42colleges have gained their permission from the Ministry of Education to set up translation as a major.The explosion of translation majors around the country inevitably prompts concern over the quality, the nature, and the orientation of the newly-sprung major. Quite a few scholars delve into the study of translation major, but few dig deeper into the study of translation program, let alone the research on the relationship between translation competence and translation program.Translation undergraduate program consists mainly of two parts---training objective and curriculum design, while translation competence is viewed from the perspective that it is the standards to measure a professional translator.Therefore, this thesis set out to explore the definition of translation competence, and establish a translation competence model on the basis of previous researches; and conduct comparison between translation competence and the training objectives of translation undergraduate program from the19colleges, and it is found that they coincide with each other. So in the latter discussions, translation competence is used as the yardstick to measure translation curriculum. All courses are classified according to the translation competence model, and number of colleges open up such courses is counted. Finally, for each individual college, the number of courses that are opened up under each translation sub-competence, are calculated.It is found that though in three colleges, interpretation and written translation are two independent majors, all their courses are the same except those concerning interpretation and written translation; colleges are quite unanimous in their choosing courses for English competence; psychological quality education, though emphasized in training objectives of many colleges, finds its name in only one translation curriculum; courses related to business and mass media are the apples in the eyes of most colleges; colleges differ their positions greatly with regard to cross-disciplinary courses, and their views mass on the two extremes of spectrum, and the list of findings is longer than this abstract can contain, so we just temporarily end here.This thesis tries to shed some new and objective light on the study of translation undergraduate program by viewing it from the lens of translation competence and referring to more colleges for data support. Hopefully, this thesis will furnish useful information for future researchers, who are determined to go further on the road to improve undergraduate translation program, and help our colleges turn out better, and more qualified translators.