A Study Of The Effect Of Translation Workshop Teaching Model On English Major Students' Translation Competence

Since many colleges were granted to recruit professional translation undergraduates, the pattern of training translators alone by English majors has been broken. Therefore, English majors' translation teaching was placed in a worse-off-than-some-better-off-than-many dilemma. Some objective reasons,including fewer class hours, single teaching materials, shortage of professional teachers and defects of teaching model, make the teaching effect of English majors' translation criticized widely. So front-line translation teachers and scholars have always focused on how to improve student's translation competence. As an inheritance and development of the conventional teaching model, translation workshop is considered to be a teaching model to effectively improve student's translation competence. In 2007 the Academic Degree Committee of the State Council issued a document in which it was officially and explicitly put forward for the first time as a teaching model for MTI(Master of Translation and Interpreting). Stones from other hills may serve to polish the jade of this one. Translation workshop can also be applied to English majors as an effective model of translation teaching to explore its effect on student's translation competence.Translation workshop appeared in the United States in the 1960 s. Since then the domestic and foreign scholars have ever studied its application effect. It has been adopted as a pragmatic teaching model to help develop translator's competence by many universities in the United States. In recent years, many universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China have favored it, and many research achievements are available. Using their researches on translation workshop teaching model for reference, the author divides it into three stages: pre-translation, while-translation and post-translation, at each stage clear assignments are distributed to the students so that students can complete translation tasks by means of continuous discussion and cooperation in a lot of translation practice and thereby improve translation competence step by step in the process. In order to study the effect of translation workshop teaching model on translation teaching for English majors and its influenceon English majors' translation competence, the author puts forward two hypotheses: 1)As for teaching effect such as teaching goal attainment, motivation stimulation,interest cultivation, class participation, etc, translation workshop teaching model is superior to that of the conventional teaching model; 2) translation workshop teaching model is beneficial to improve English majors' translation competence such as language competence, text competence, subject competence, cultural competence,transfer competence, in particular language competence and transfer competence.To explore these two hypotheses, the author conducts a 16-week teaching experiment on 99 third-year English majors from School of Foreign Language of Suzhou University. These students are divided into two classes: experimental class with 48 students and control class with 51 students. In experimental class, translation workshop teaching model is employed; in control class, conventional translation teaching model is adopted. In the experiment, the authors adopts the following research instruments: pre-test and post-test, questionnaire and interview. At the end of the teaching experiment, the author analyzes the collected data by means of SPSS17.0.Meanwhile some students are interviewed to find out their understanding of this teaching model and the degree of improvement of translation competence.According to research result, the teaching effect of translation workshop teaching model on translation teaching for English majors is obvious; translation competence of the students from experimental class has been significantly improved, especially language competence and transfer competence. Interviewing the students, the author also finds that because of the shorter experimental time, although a variety of practical stylistic translations are involved in, students' text competence, subject competence and cultural competence are not improved greatly as expected. In the concluding part of the thesis, the author also puts forward some pedagogical suggestions for future research.