A Study On Curriculum Design Of BTI Program Guided By The Specialized Standards Of Translation Skills

The undergraduate education on translation has been officially separated from the foreign language teaching system since the Ministry of Education has authorized three universities (Fudan University, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Hebei Normal University) to set up the BTI program and train BTI students to become professional translators and interpreters. By the end of2012, a total of57universities have been permitted to establish BTI programs. Despite a rapid development of the newly-set BT1programs, the program still has a long way to go. The BTI teaching plans vary widely in Chinese mainland universities and colleges. This curriculum can potentially bring a huge influence on the successful training of qualified translators and interpreters, so it needs to be carefully planed with systematical, scientific, gradually advanced and effective strategies. From the perspective of curriculum design, this paper puts forward the specialized standards of translation skills (short for SSTS) and arranges modules based on the SSTS to solve the problems that exist in our undergraduate education on translation.This paper firstly collects the BTI teaching plans and other relevant materials from several universities in Mainland China. Through statistics analysis and comparative analysis, it reveals the importance of specialized standards for translation skills, which most BTI curricula have shed little light on. This paper also points out that BTI students’professional skills should be specified in order to train them to be qualified translators and interpreters in an efficient way. Based on the above analyses, this paper introduces the specialized standards of translation skills and divides it into four aspects:linguistic skills, translating and interpreting skills, supplementary skills and practical skills. Furthermore, the standards of the four skills that BTI students should reach are described in details. Afterwards, this paper designs and categorizes the BTI courses into four corresponding modules, which contributes to BTI students’ acquisition of the required professional skills. This paper concludes that the curriculum design of the BTI program should be based on specialized standards of translation skills and corresponding courses should be opened to further develop BTI students’professional skills. Therefore, the quality of the BTI program can be improved and the BTI students can perform well in their own work places in the future. This thesis discusses how to design the curriculum of BTI programs in Mainland China, according to the special standards of translation skills. Therefore, three conclusions are made in this thesis:first and foremost, in order to improve the reliability and validity of the SSTS, translation competence and translation performance should be well balanced by translation skills, and the evaluation methods of the SSTS had better combine formative evaluation and summative evaluation. Secondly, based on the descriptive study on BT1students’ mastery of translation skills in different periods, the four corresponding modules should be designed from simple to complex, from easy to difficult and from rough to subtle, according to the BTI students’ translation learning pattern, stressing the cohesion, coherence and hierarchy among BTI courses and modules. Last but not least, on the premise that the BTI program is set in accordance with social needs, universities should adjust their own teaching focus and the contents of BTI modules accordingly, so as to serve for our nation’s translation educational mechanism to the largest extent and enhance the quality of professional translators and interpreters in Mainland China.