Back-translation And Collocation In Chinese-English Translation

This research, based on social constructivism theory, intends to make an investigation into the influence of back-translation on translation learners' Chinese to English translation competence. Collocation will be used to evaluate the changes in translation learners' translation competence.The research argues that teaching collocation can not only improve translation learners' Chinese-to English translation competence, but also have positive influence on translation learners' English language competence. Back-translation can encourage translation learners to study by themselves and help them improve the awareness of linguistic differences between Chinese and English languages.The research finds that translation competence, English language competence, and collocation knowledge are closely interrelated with each other. After taking back-translation training, translation learners' correct output of collocation has been improved significantly, and their awareness of linguistic differences between Chinese and English languages also has been enhanced greatly. Moreover, most of the research subjects have the willingness to learn more about collocation knowledge.The research suggests that, in back-translation training, articles on different topics should be chosen; we should try our best to avoid translation learners' plagiarism in their back-translation assignments, we can try out the method of group discussion. In view of translation teaching, we should reconsider the position of translation course in English teaching, that is, the former should play a more important role in the latter. As for translator training, we should make further research on how to improve translation learners' English language competence, and we should help them perceive the differences and similarities between their mother language and the foreign language. Collocation teaching should also be conducted in English courses and translation courses. Translation learners should be provided with more self-teaching opportunities.This research is far from being perfect. The research only has a limited number of research subjects. Moreover, credible reliability does not show up in collocation competence test, and the research has not grouped students according to their proficiency, so the third research question, viz. whether students with different proficiency can make different progress, can not be answered. This research finds that if we want to answer the question "Why some translators translate well, while others give poor translation?" we may safely say that different proficiency of translators is the correct answer. However, in the process of translation, many kinds of competence are involved. These include English language competence, Chinese language competence, translation skills, and translation experience. The question "What kind of competence will influence the quality of translation?" needs to be further investigated.