| This abstract is divided into six parts.Part one ForewordThe main purpose of the research is to discover what thinking processes are involved when a translator transforms a text from one language into another in a particular context, the relationship between students'professional competence in translation and the quality of their translated texts and how to improve EFL students'professional competence in translation. Specifically, my study aims to gain insight into the underlying mental translation strategies used by the translators. The study not only seeks to examine how expert and student translators go through the processes differently and what constitutes translation expertise but also observes the strategy to develop EFL students'professional competence in translation. In this context, translation is defined in its narrow sense of"written transfer of a message from one language to another"(Roberts 2002).The languages involved in my study are English and Chinese, the two languages with which I am most familiar, and they also represent two typologically very different languages, which may reveal facts unique to such cases. I chose to use narrative and technical texts (English/Chinese) rather than literary texts for the relative ease of assessing translations of the former over the latter. Practical reasons also informed this decision, because most translation training programs seek to train professional non-literary translators (Kiraly 1995), and China is particularly in need of good non-literary translators.Part two Significance of the researchStudying the process of translation is important both theoretically and pedagogically. The process of translation is an essential part of understanding what translation is and a prerequisite for informing translation students about how to become better translators. Translation is a complex social and cognitive activity. From a commonsensical view, translation involves the ST, the TT, the process through which the ST becomes the TT, the context where translation takes place, and of course the translator as the key agent of all the components in a translation activity. Accordingly, my study is magnificent in the following aspects.First of all, translation has undergone a considerable shift of interest away from prescriptive and rather anecdote attitudes, towards more descriptive, scientific positions in recent years. One of the consequences of this shift of interest has been the increase in empirical research into the translation process. This was driven by the belief that what goes on in the translator's head while he or she is translating (versus what scholars had claimed might go on) is at least as crucial to the understanding of translation as a comparative analysis of the final product, the translated text, in relation to the source text. For a number of reasons, the translated text provides a very incomplete and often misleading way into the translation process, hiding both successful strategies and problems (Bernardini 2001). Therefore, the process-oriented research can be a dynamic site contributing to a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of translation.Second, there is a need in China for process-oriented studies in translation. Traditionally, translation studies have been largely based on text analysis (Baker 1998, Venuti 2000) and only in the 1980s did process-oriented studies begin to emerge. To this day, however, such study in China is rare. Seldom can we see study directly investigating the actual mental processes of translators. One of the goals of my study is to fertilize this land and try to open up another dimension of translation studies in China that focuses on the process (including the product), rather than the final product of translation alone.Third, nowadays translation is not only an activity of transferring source texts into target texts, but more like an activity catering for specific needs of human beings in the society. On the one hand, in this age of mass communications, the expanding translation market calls for more professional translators in various fields, especially in the fields such as science and technology, laws, economics, etc. On the other hand, the actual situation in translation profession in China lags far behind what is desired, which puts the professional training into the highlight. There are limited numbers of both professional translators and training organizations in China, so most of translation works are handled by semi-professional ones represented by college teachers and factory workers, or even some bilinguals who haven't received any formal translation training. These translators take translation as a part-time job and undermine the status of professional ones by vicious competition (un)consciously to some extent. Such a widening gap between the demand for and supply of professional translators can be narrowed by enlarging the number of qualified professional translators. Fourth, Professional-oriented translation training/education is the main-trend abroad, and is also the trend that the translation education in China follows. From the university standpoint, the aim of the translation education in institutions of higher education is to produce professional translators catering for needs from the labor market. As Don Kiraly concludes in her book,"translators today cannot afford to be linguistic hermits, sitting alone behind a typewriter and surrounded only by dusty tomes (Kiraly, 2000:12)."The field of translation education has now gradually broadened to the extent that it encompasses not only factors within the traditional class (such as analysis of literary text, teacher-dominated teaching process, etc.) but also factors concerning the extra-academic fields (such as the job market, the client, and the target readers, etc.).Therefore, in order to make the necessary preparation for being on the work force, students should be led to foster their adaptability to the market with real clients and companies. It is not a kind of future thing that is too early for students to touch upon."Neurological research seems to indicate that the sooner a skill is developed, the more receptive and tuned the brain will be towards it."(Davies, 2004:78) In addition, as our pilot survey on the local market and shows, it is a fact that employers have definite expectations of new graduates majoring in translation, while they find out that the universities fall short of meeting their expectations regarding required competences or knowledge, especially students'preparation for dealing with specialized translation, terminology management and information technology. This may also account for why I emphasize the true translation project for translation class in university.Part three Research questionsAny translation involves the source text (ST) and the target text (TT), but how is an ST transformed into its TT? What are the mental operations of the translator that lead to the TT? If translators at different professional levels produce TTs of different qualities, what are the differences in terms of their cognitive moves, strategies? What constitutes the expertise of translation? How can translation students be helped to translate better? Driven by an urge to find answers to these theoretical and pedagogical questions, I designed the research to find answers to the following questions:RQ1: What text-processing strategies do Chinese translators adopt and what processing levels do they go through?RQ2: Are there any differences and similarities between expert and student translator in terms of the translation strategies and processing level? If so, what are they?RQ3: Will the students'overall professional competence be improved after going through the translation project?RQ4: Is the improvement of each component of PC in translation in a hierarchic rank in its significance? If any, what kind of hierarchic rank is it?RQ5: Will the quality of the students'translated texts be improved after going through the translation project?RQ6: Is there any correlation between the PC in translation and the quality of the translated texts? If any, what kind of correlation is it?Part four Research methodologyFor the study on the differences of thinking processes between the expert and student translators, it is common practice to investigate linguistic performance in order to gain specific insights into the underlying mental processes. My investigation follows the same procedural approach. It takes an empirical approach to its object of investigation. Borrowed from the psycholinguistic study, TAP method is used to investigate the performance in translation process. The verbalized thought uttered by the translators will be recorded, described, and analyzed.For the research on the relationship between students'professional competence in translation and the quality of their translated texts and how to improve EFL students'professional competence in translation, data in this part are collected from two questionnaires, one for 8 fourth-year students in the English school of one university in Henan province, and the other for the client of the translation project. Without any experiences in any translation project before, the students are engaged in the present translation task and are assigned with instruction books of machinery. The two questionnaires are separately designed for the students and the client, namely, the Professional Competence Questionnaire for EFL Students (see Appendix 6) and the Quality Assessment Questionnaire (see Appendix 7).The former is designed based on"professional elements"normalized by eleven authorized international organizations of translators and interpreters. The latter is based on Darwish (2001) and Gile (1995) and its practical foundation is the translation quality requirements adopted by eight translation companies/agencies in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.The Professional Competence Questionnaire and the Quality Assessment Questionnaire were distributed separately to the subjects after the students finish their translation of the first book and when they had finished the second book. The translation project lasts for two months. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS, version 13.0) is adopted to analyze the raw data of the questionnaires. What's more, literature studies and follow-up interviews are used as the complementary methods.Part five Research conclusions, implications and limitationsConclusion 1: Different translators differ greatly in the translation process. By observing the 12 participants translating aloud two scientific texts, both C-E and E-C translation, the research finds out the following translation strategies they adopt in the translation process: problem identification, storage and retrieval, general search and selection/interpretation of ST segments, reasoning, text contextualization, editing/monitoring of TT segments, and extra textual & language use/task monitoring, each with series sub-strategies. All the strategies have been used by the participants, both experts and students. Interpretation of ST segments and TT monitoring accounted the largest proportion of all the strategy use, which indicates that the comprehension of the ST and the production of the TT are the focus of the participants'translation endeavors. The problem-solving translation process took place at three distinguishable levels: rhetorical, conceptual and linguistic forms level. Transferring at the linguistic form level accounted the largest proportion of this processing act, which indicated that translation is basically a linguistic activity. The higher-level (conceptual and rhetorical) processing act was also found, especially in the case of expert translators. A lack of rhetorical analysis and macro-strategy might lead to inefficient translation. Both the experts and the students encountered problems at all of the linguistic form, conceptual, and rhetorical levels, and they all exhibited all of the aforementioned types of strategies, but they differed in terms of quality and quantity of execution of these acts. In general, the experts'strategies were more efficient and were executed at higher levels, leading to successful solution. To be specific, the experts tended to use more global strategies such as reasoning, text contextualization. They went out the boundaries of linguistic units where the problems appeared, but used a larger context and world knowledge to solve the problems. They spent more energy on the thorough understanding of the gist and rhetorical function of the ST before actually translating. Their translation pattern stressed on global-level conceptual and rhetorical issues and then dealed with more local, specific problems of linguistic forms. During the translation process, the experts were free to comment on the ST and were confident on their decision making. They were a mediator of interlanguage and intercultural communication. On the contrary, the students began the translation task with questioning certain words or phrases in the ST. When they encountered translation problems, they tried to solve them within the boundaries of linguistic units, seldom looking beyond the problems for hints, such as text contextualization. Their grasp of global semantic and textual coherence was not well coordinated with their local-level transferring acts. In the translation process, they students doubted about their translation, and they viewed themselves as students working on an assignment. After a detailed comparison of the expert and student translators'behaviors, some features typically found among the experts emerged. They are described in three aspects. First of all, translation expertise means development of comprehensive and multi-dimensional translation competence in rhetorical, conceptual and linguistic levels. The translation competence involves considerable use of global strategies of rhetorical reasoning of the translation task and text construction that can guide the local-level translation processing acts. Therefore, translation experts play multiple roles of rhetorical function analyzer, meaning constructor, and text engineer. Secondly, translation expertise features a top-down processing style. Experts tend to start translation with thorough understanding of the ST to build a complete rhetorical and conceptual representation of the task, and then move to the linguistic form level. Accordingly, the translation processing is in a more controlled way, ideas being translated rather than words. Thirdly, translation expertise involves active engagement in social interactions in the translation activity. Experts are confident about their translation, and maintain a positive self-image as a mediator in interlanguage and intercultural communication.Conclusion 2: There is a positive correlation between the professional competence (PC) in translation and the quality of the translated text (TQ).The students in the present study have made a remarkable progress both in their PC in translation and in the quality of their translated text, which testifies the positive effect of the authentic translation experiences in cultivating EFL students'PC in translation. By being exposed to a translation project, students have the access to the translation materials and resources that are available to professional translators. In this way they are more likely to acquire PC directly. The improvement of each component of PC in translation is in a hierarchic rank in its significance. The three best developed components of PC in translation are: Ethics, Interpersonal Communication Skills and Translation Resources, followed by Physical and Psychological Conditions, Training, Working Attitudes and Behavior and finally Quality Management Skills. In addition, although the students haven't made a remarkable progress concerning the overall competence of Working Attitudes and Behavior, their working attitudes have been improved greatly (such as being modest and cooperative in their work). However, their working behaviors are still undesirable in that they are not sensitive to their own rights, especially their deserved payment, since they regard the project as a practice but not a commercial activity. As for the Quality Management Skills, the students fail to make a remarkable progress due to two reasons:(a)the students were more competent and could render out a TT with better quality(b)the students were constrained by the objective conditions. The students in the present study have made a remarkable progress in the quality of their translated text, which helps testify the positive effect of the authentic translation experiences in cultivating EFL students'PC in translation. After the translation project, there proves to be a positive correlation between the PC in translation and the quality of the translated text, though some correlations were low and not significant due to the small size of subjects in the study. Ethics (Component C), Interpersonal Communication Skills (Component F) and Translation Resources (Component B) are the top three that have significant positive correlations with the quality of the translated texts.From the above findings, the research has got some implications.Implication 1: The experts in my study frequently used global strategies to solve the problems at every level and exhibited effective processing acts at the rhetorical level, which were much less presented in students'translation process. In light of the findings, a hypothesis can be formulated that the appropriate use of global strategies and high skill is significant. Firstly, it reflects the textual, cognitive and social realities of translation, and secondly, it helps to provide an answer to the questioning of translation expertise. It is important and effective to teach the features of translation expertise that are missing in the students'translation process. Implications based on the findings of the constituents of translation expertise is of great importance for the translation training, First of all, effective translation training should help students understand the importance of thorough comprehension of the ST before actual translation. It is important to analyze the rhetorical function and to construct the meaning of the ST. Students should be taught to look beyond the problem units for hints in larger context and to solve the problems with global strategies. Secondly, a top-down knowledge-based approach to translation must be introduced to students explicitly. Practice in higher-level rhetorical and conceptual analysis of the ST should be situated in translation teaching, for it can make the processing in much more controlled a way. Thirdly, it is necessary to teach students that they are translators, not trans-coder of two languages, and many social and cultural factors can affect the translation, which should not be ignored in the translation teaching. Furthermore, authentic translation projects should be provided for the students, thus they can be informed of what the real-life translation task is like, and their confidence of handling the social communication can be enhanced.Implication 2: It is beneficial for the college translation teachers to pay much attention on the students'PC training in their courses.Firstly, it is crucial to take a constructivist approach to translation education/training by bringing authentic tasks into the academic environment. By increasing students'sense of responsibility and raising their interests, real-life situations increase the likelihood that students would be more engaged in their learning and thus invest more effort and time on learning. It is also one of the reasons that made the students stick willingly to the translation project from the beginning to the end. Secondly, teachers should pay attention to those components of PC that are least developed, for example, Physical and Psychological Conditions, Training, Working Attitudes and Behaviors and Quality Management Skills. Teachers are supposed to act as an active project manager, teaching instructor and the facilitator(not as instructors dominating every aspect of the translation project)to create a more favorable environment for the students'overall acquisition of the PC in translation. In this sense, teachers are responsible for the following things such as acquainting students with market situations and then finding out the proper tasks, dividing the class into several groups according to the difficulty and the amount of the assignment, assessing students'translation competence with the help from the client of the translation project, etc. Thirdly, in the translation teaching, great importance should be attached to those components of PC that can be best developed in the translation project and also are positively correlated with the quality of translated text, namely, Ethics, Interpersonal Communication Skills and Translation Resources.Of course, the limitations of the research must be also put forward.Limitation 1: Methodologically speaking, the major method for data collection-TAP can only offer incomplete messages of the whole mental processes, which is indicated by one participant's response to the proportion of thoughts they uttered, below 30%.Though retrospection and behavior notes were used to complement the data to greatest extent, it is possible that some of the processes have not been captured. For the future study of this process-oriented study, a computer software program named Translog, which can record all the key strokes of the user, may improve the efficiency and validity of data collection.Limitation 2: In my study, all the participants, experts or students were all required to undertake the same translation task, disregarding their preference or predominance in certain genre of texts. This may result in the situation that some participants were at advantage over others, thus the reflection of their translation processes may not be sufficient. It is important to select the experiment subjects according to their background information, trying to find the translators specialized in the same genre.Limitation 3: Translation is by nature a social activity, but the translation task in my study is experimental (i.e., the same ST for all participants), though I tried to make the experiment as close to real-life as possible. As a result, translation expertise identified from the experts'behavior may not be so authentic. Therefore, it is important to design a more natural, real-life task research, which can be more effective in capturing a wider range of translators'behaviors.Limitation 4: As for the instrumentation adopted in the present study, on the one side, two questionnaires are designed for the specific needs, the Professional Competence Questionnaire for EFL Students and the Quality Assessment Questionnaire for the client. The self-designed questionnaires in the present study suffer from many limitations both in their content and structures which call for further improvement. For instance, it is hard to avoid the simplicity and superficiality and the structures are not immune to further improvement. One suggestion made here for future research is that the questionnaire should be well-constructed based on literature studies in a wider range and discussions with the researchers who are doing the same research in the world. On the other side, the follow-up interviews were not conducted in a systematic way. The author failed to form any specific questions to the sticking point but just asked for some information when the author was puzzled by the information collected from the questionnaires or sometimes the author just talked with the students whenever the author got some new ideas. Therefore, it is suggested that in-depth interviews or even case studies can also be used as a complement for the questionnaire survey.Limitation 5: The reliability of the final results is affected by the sample size in the present empirical study(8 samples).In such a follow-up survey designed for the translation project, the materials needed to be translated are limited and thus the research needed only 8 participants. With such a small sample size, the change of any individual value may have strong influence on the entire statistical results. Thus future research is suggested to choose a larger sample size by creating more favorable conditions, by finding a larger translation project, for example.In summary, the present study is a tentative and exploratory attempt to explore the different translators'thinking process and their professional competence, which is bound to be a little superficial and bears many shortcomings and needs to be improved, but it is still an open question. Thus further research on them under the academic environment is urgently needed, especially in China.Part six Structure of the researchThe whole paper is designed to comprise eight chapters.Chapter 1 is Introduction.Chapter 2 is a brief overview of the studies on translation process and strategies. Conceptual contributions and limitations will be discussed and evaluated, focusing on TAPs in translation studies.Chapter 3 deals with the empirical study of translation process with think-aloud protocol experiments.Chapter 4 is the data analysis part, and some major findings of the differences of thinking processes between the expert and student translators will be presented. Chapter 5 elaborates the relevant literature reviews which fall into three aspects: literature about PC in translation, literature about TQA in professional translator education and finally literature about Constructivism.Chapter 6 explains for the empirical research on the relationship between students'professional competence in translation and the quality of their translated texts and the strategy to improve EFL students'professional competence, which includes the subjects, instrumentation, and detailed procedures of the data collection and data processing. The author also introduces the measures she took during the experiment for validity control of the present study.In Chapter 7, raw data collected from the two questionnaires in the two-staged translation project are analyzed by means of SPSS (version 13.0), and answers are provided to the four research questions: (1) Will the students'overall professional competence be improved after going through the translation project? (2) Is the improvement of each component of PC in translation in a hierarchic rank in its significance? (3) Will the quality of the students'translated texts be improved after going through the translation project? (4) Is there any correlation between the professional competence and the quality of the translated text? If any, what kind of correlation is it?In Chapter 8, discussions about the results of the empirical study are carried out and then conclusions are made based on the research findings. Then some pedagogical implications are proposed, and then the limitations of the current study are presented as well as some suggestions for further research. Eventually, it will expose the conclusion and implications by revisiting the research questions.
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