Translation Transfer Competence And Creative Thinking

Beeby (2004:40) once proposed that translation was the most complicated cognitive process. Translation competence, as a vital part of translation, has been enjoying great popularity among researchers. In view of insufficient empirical studies in creative thinking of the recent research status of translation transfer competence (the central component of translation competence), this paper contributes to verifying the relationship between creative thinking and translation transfer competence through questionnaires and a test. Based on the contrastive study in structural transfer (a part of translation transfer competence) of participants with different levels of creative thinking, this study aims to analyze the overall relationship between creative thinking and translation transfer competence, the relationship between translation transfer competence of different kinds of Adverbialized Attributive Clauses and creative thinking, and the differences in translation transfer competence of different kinds of Adverbialized Attributive Clauses between the high-creative-thinking group and the low-creative-thinking group.In this paper, the Williams Creativity Scale is the tool to differentiate the levels of creative thinking; the performance of structural transfer in the translation of Adverbialized Attributive Clauses is the performance of structural transfer competence; and the scores of last term’s final English exam are used to represent the English proficiency of participants. On the basis of the accomplishment of papers in the survey, the scores of English final exam last term and Williams Creativity Scale, sixty subjects, selected from one hundred volunteers, were divided into two groups, that is, the high-creative-thinking group and the low-creative-thinking group according to the score of Williams Creativity Scale.The results of the experiment which are through the independent samples of t-test and correlation to verify the relationship translation transfer competence between and creative thinking show as follows:Firstly, creative thinking has an impact on translation transfer competence. More specifically, the participants with high creative thinking tend to perform better in the transfer competence, which conforms to the features of creative thinking, that is, originality, fluency and creativity and the research on the priming effect on the inhibition ability of location of high-creative thinking participants which shows that it is more convenient and possible for the high-creative-thinking participants to overcome the negative influence of English structure. Secondly, after the analysis of the relationship between creative thinking and different types of Adverbialized Attributive Clauses to investigate the specific relationship between creative thinking and translation transfer competence, there is no correlation between creative thinking and translation transfer competence in Adverbialized Attributive Clauses of Cause and there are correlations in other five types of clauses. As for the results of the clauses distributed from the perspective of functional grammar (the Adverbialized Attributive Clauses are classified into two parts:restrictive clauses and non-restrictive clauses), creative thinking has an effect on translation competence in restrictive clauses and non-restrictive clauses in Adverbialized Attributive Clauses.Thirdly, the results represent that there is a significant difference between the high-creative-thinking and the low-creative-thinking group in the translation transfer competence of Adverbialized Attributive Clauses of Cause while the other five types do not show any significant differences between the two groups.Fourthly, the results represent that there is no significant difference between the two groups in the translation transfer competence of non-restrictive clauses while there is a significant difference between the two groups in the translation transfer competence of restrictive clauses, which accords with findings of fixed thinking modes and fixed psychological orientations, that is, the participants with high creative thinking tend to be more proficient to break the boundary between items and the fixed set of thinking orientation.All in all, creative thinking exerts influence on structural transfer, whose improvement contributes to the development of translation transfer competence. In the same level of English proficiency, the development of creative thinking accelerates the development of translation transfer competence, which would further contribute to improvement of translation competence. Theoretically, this study has verified the positive effort of creative thinking on translation transfer competence. Practically, this thesis provides insight for translation theory and practice.