Application Of Nord’s Text Functional Strategies Into Vocational College English Translation Teaching

Text functional Theory is put forward by Nord, establishing on Buhler’s instrumentalmodels of language functions, Jacobson’s language functional models and Vermeer’s Skopostheory. Nord holds a view that translation is a communicative action, namely, what strategies willbe taken depends on the aims or purposes of translation. There are two principles in this theory:Loyalty and Function. Function means the translated texts functions in an expected way in thetarget text. Loyalty refers to the interpersonal relationships among translator, source writer, targetreceiver and the originator. According to Nord, there are four kinds of functions of text:referential, expressive, appellative and phatic functions. Based on the differences of four textfunctions, documentary and instrumental translation are come up.The domestic and overseas research on translation teaching, in recent decades, has revealeda diversified trend. A number of researchers have been working hard to explore all kinds ofteaching methods and translation theories to improve the quality of translation teaching. The aimis to cultivate lots of qualified translators to meet the demand of social development. With thedevelopment of translation teaching and research, the teaching of text functions has becomemore and more important. However, as far as the situation of domestic translation teaching isconcerned, teachers tend to emphasize skills, with less attention to the cultivation of textfunctions so that many students attach more importance to learning translation skills, but ignoredifferent translation strategies based on different text functions. This thesis applies Nord’s textfunctional theory and strategies in vocational college, confirming the translation strategies ofdifferent text functions provides a new view for the translation standard and can solve theproblem existed in the translation teaching.In order to check out the feasibility and validity of text function-based teaching methods intranslation teaching, this thesis reports a quasi-experiment of college English translation coursein Institute of Shandong Trade Union’s Administration Cadres for18weeks. The subjects arethe sophomore come from the English professional of87subjects, the author randomly choosesclass one as the experimental class and the number is43, the other is control class and thenumber is44. The instruments utilized in the study are contrastive analysis, quantitativeanalysis and qualitative analysis to check the hypothesis of the research.According to the current situation of translation teaching in vocational college and thedevelopment of text functional theory, the author comes up with three questions in the research:1) Text function-based teaching is more effective than the traditional teaching to improvestudents’ translation level;2) Text function-based teaching can enhance students’ interest and change their attitude towards translation;3) Text function-based teaching approaches will nurturestudents’ text type awareness;After a semester’s teaching of Nord’s functional theory in the experimental class, analyzingthe data collected from the test, questionnaires and interview, we can conclude that textfunction-based approaches have the following influence on students’ translation competence,students’ interest and attitude and their text awareness.