A Probe Into The Writing Of Master Degree Theses On Translation Teaching Based On2003-2012Investigative Data

Studies on translation teaching provide guidance for translation teaching. As an importantresource of translation teaching studies, master degree theses on translation teaching not onlyreveal the tendency of translation teaching to some extent, but also reflect existing problems incultivating graduates majoring in translation teaching. Therefore, research on the master degreetheses on translation teaching may present a more comprehensive view of the latestdevelopment of translation teaching, including the problems in both thesis writing and translationteaching and proper reference to translation teaching as well.The previous studies on relative articles and theses on translation teaching, including masterdegree theses, however, pay much attention to the current situation of translation teachingresearches, or the main tendency and existing problems from macroscopic perspective, with littleor no attention to master degree theses in terms of topic selection, research subjects, researchmethodology and thesis writing. Therefore, the author selected55master degree theses with thetheme of “translation teaching”(2003-2012) from China Master’s Theses Full-text Database(CMFD) in CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) by random sampling according tothe year of publication, about25%of the total number each year. By text analysis method, theauthor did the descriptive analysis of those theses from the perspectives of topic selection,research subjects, research methodology and thesis writing to find their main characteristics,advantages and disadvantages. And then30graduates from Shandong Normal University,Shanxi Normal University, Henan Normal University, Northeast Normal University, BohaiUniversity and Qufu Normal University were questioned and6of them were interviewed by theauthor to explore the factors which might influence those main characteristics and the realreasons for the relative problems in the thesis writing.The findings are:1) In terms of the topic selection, the number of master degree theses ontranslation teaching has increased year by year and the topics have shown greater diversity. Andthere has been an obvious growth in the number of theses on the interdisciplinary researches,with for instance, linguistics, psychology, education and other cognitive science penetrated intothe researches on translation teaching. However, problems do exist in topic selection. Firstly,topic selection isn’t distributed evenly. What’s more, most researches on the topic of theapplication of western theories to domestic translation teaching are far from being innovative.And some graduates are confused over how to properly combine theories with selected topics.2)As for research subjects, most graduates chose college students as their research subjects. 3) When it comes to research methodology, most theses fall into the category of the combinationof documentary and empirical research, fundamental and application research, or qualitative andquantitative research. Research instruments are diverse in one study, which is usually guided andinfluenced by supervisors. And there appears a growing interest among graduates in theknowledge of Statistical Package of Social Science (SPSS), which is not yet well studied.4) Inlight of the standards of thesis writing, problems are mainly found in the writing pattern ofabstract and introduction, citations and bibliography format, the voices and tenses, etc.Finally, based on the above findings, the author put forward suggestions to better cultivatepost-graduates majoring in translation teaching from the perspective of curriculum design,pedagogies and gradates self-development.