A Translog-based Comparative Study Of Revising Patterns Of Translators With Different Levels Of Translation Expertise

The exploration into actual translation process has been one of the hottest topics in Translation Studies recently. As an important stage of translation process, translation revision has also drawn increasing attention. Previous researches concerning translation revision are commonly featured with probing into revisions either in the drafting or in the post-drafting phase, thus lacking a systematic discussion of translation revision throughout the whole translation process. In addition to this, as important aspects of translation revision, characteristics of translators’revising behaviors in different translation phases and the linguistic levels where revisions occur have been rarely explored. Therefore, more studies are needed regarding these research topics.With a combination of Translog program and a post-translation interview as the research method, the present study attempts to compare the revising patterns of student translators and professional translators in C-E translation, focusing on the distribution and characteristics of revising efforts and the distribution of revisions in terms of the linguistic levels where they occurred.The major findings show that:in allocating the revising efforts, according to the actual number of revisions, both student and professional translators made more revisions in the drafting phase than in the post-drafting phase, indicating that a larger amount of revising efforts were allocated in the drafting phase. Differing from previous ones, it was further discovered in the present study that there existed a big gap regarding the percentage points of the revising efforts allocated in the drafting phase between professional translators and student translators, which revealed that in spite of the between-subject similarity of the overall distribution pattern of revising efforts, revising efforts of professionals were more concentrated in the drafting phase than that of student translators. Moreover, differences were also identified with regard to revising characteristics of the two types of translators. In the drafting phase, most revisions made by professionals were mainly featured by the refinement of the target text whereas student translators tended to correct translation errors in this phase. And things changed in the post-drafting phase. Unlike revising characteristics in drafting phase which suggested a clear-cut difference between the translators, revising characteristics in this phase reflected an overlapping feature between the two types of translators. To be more specific, while preserving their respective revising characteristics of the drafting phase, both translators were found to possess revising characteristics of their counterparts in the post-drafting phase. Professionals were observed in some cases to make changes to correct errors in the target text and student translators focused some of their revising efforts on refining the target text in the phase. As far as the distribution of revisions at different linguistic levels is concerned, lexical level was recognized to be the level where most translation revisions occurred in the present study, thus verified the results of previous researches involving different language pairs. What’s more, a considerable difference was spotted between student and professional translators concerning the linguistic levels where revisions occurred. Student translators tended to revise at relatively lower linguistic levels such as lexical and phrasal level, while professionals were inclined to work on higher linguistic levels like clausal level. Through a comparison of revision quality at certain linguistic levels by the two types of subjects, it was also found that professionals attached importance to both the faithfulness and expressiveness of the translation while revising, which might lead to a better translation than that of student translators wrhose revising behaviors in some cases resulted in unsatisfactory translation versions in that there were still various problems in their target texts.With regard to research significance, from theoretical perspective, the present study addresses the distribution and characteristics of revising efforts of translators, confirming results of previous studies in the situation of C-E translation, which may contribute to the theoretical establishment of translation revision studies. Apart from this, the present study sheds light on comparison of revising behaviors of student and professional translators, and differences are identified concerning the distribution and characteristics of revising efforts as well as the revision quality, all of which expands and specifies the research questions of translation revision studies, thus providing a new perspective for future studies. From methodological point of view, the present study employs a combination of Translog program and a post-translation interview as the research method, which remedies the weakness of single data-collecting method in previous studies and ensures a more comprehensive and objective description of translators" revising behaviors. As a result, such method can be replicated in future studies. What’s more, the observation of revising behaviors of professional translators may suggest pedagogical implications for translation training. Since professionals are inclined to work at higher linguistic levels while revising and their revisions, in most cases, are not confined to the correcting of target text but aims to refine the target text for a better quality. So in translation training, students should be instructed to direct their efforts to develop such awareness and capability so as to improve their translation performance. However, the present study still suffers from limitations due to the small sample size and defects in pre-translation training. So more studies are needed in future.