On Cultivating The Translation Competence Of English Majors

Translation competence, including translation and interpretation, is acomprehensive competence of language use and an integrated reflection of linguisticknowledge and other knowledge. The development of translation competencerequires not only intensive learning of Chinese and English, but also training oftranslation skills and cultivation of other related competences.English is a universal language. With increasing exchanges among countries, thedemands for high quality English translation professionals will keep increasing. Itbecomes an urgent task to train more high quality English translation professionals tomeet the social demands. English majors are reserves for potential translationprofessionals, and developing their translation competence becomes more and moreimportant. Currently, the shortages of translation teaching in China mainly includeunclear teaching objectives, inadequate teaching methods, unsystematic translationcurriculums, a lack of translation evaluation system, and students' inadequatelanguage proficiency. The cultivation of translation competence still lags behind.To meet the demands for high quality English translation professionals, Chinapays more and more attention to developing English majors' translation competence,and quite a few foreign language universities and colleges keep researching andimproving their translation teaching. All these make the translation teaching in Chinamore scientific and standardized. Translation teaching should abide by its internallaws, and to find out such internal laws will help improve translation teaching andstudents" translation competence. The translation training models in Europe, U. S. ,Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan are more advanced compared to those in China, andsome successful experience has been drawn regarding the cultivation of translationcompetence. To understand such experience will give us some insights for translation teaching reform in China.On the bases of a questionnaire survey and previous research, this dissertationanalyzes English majors' translation competence under current training models,points out the disadvantages of current training models, introduces some successfulexperience in translation teaching in China and abroad, and proposes some specificsuggestions on the development of translation competence. It aims at providing somehelpful inspirations and insights for the cultivation of translation competence andtranslation teaching reform for English majors.