Translation Criticism And Its Application To Undergraduate Translation Teaching Supported By Constructivism

Translation teaching plays a vital role in cultivating translators. With the expansion of translation market, translation industry is flourishing and translator fostering has become increasingly urgent and important. Consequently, translation teaching researches are being carried out more widely and deeply than ever before.The practical feature of translation determines that translation teaching aims to improve students'practical translation skills, while the artistic feature of translation requires translation teaching to value students'activeness and creativity. But the current situation of undergraduate translation teaching is far from satisfying. In English major translation courses, teachers mostly adopt the traditional give-and-accept teaching method lack of theoretical basis and scientific ways, by which students tend to do nothing but obey without question. Many translation teachers tend to explain translation techniques first, and then give students assignments, and finally, show them the reference versions. Some teachers focus primarily on the aspects of semantic transformation but not the cultural exchange aspect of translation. As a result, in the future translation practice, students can neither grasp scientific methods nor hold any initiative in translating. Evidently, the existed rigid and backward translation teaching method in our colleges and universities fail to develop innovation and creativity in students and therefore is not efficient and beneficial to translation training as well. To reform teaching method has become the leading task for teachers and researchers in order to extricate translation teaching from the predicament and improve its effect.Constructivist learning theory pays more attention to the learners and holds the viewpoint that students'learning is influenced by the environment, their beliefs and attitudes, and that teachers should encourage students to build their own concepts based upon their prior knowledge and experience and draw their own solutions. This theory advocates changing the disharmonious situation of teachers'active imparting and students'passive inputting, and providing students with more freedom to exert their wisdom, and thus leads our teaching to a right direction.Likewise, translation criticism, as has become an integral part of translation studies, establishes an essential link between translation theory and translation practice, and the driving force to translatology development. To conduct translation criticism is the very necessary way to improve translation competence. Considering the characteristics of translation criticism which are: scientific vs. artistic, subjective vs. objective, theoretical vs. practical, and the diversity of translation criteria, one may see that the criteria of translation criticism are polynary, dynamic and evolutive, and transcendental and constructive by nature. Thereby, to conduct translation criticism in class will definitely require students to exert their creativity and initiative.Based on constructivist learning theory and knowledge about translation criticism, the author hypothesizes that if translation criticism can be applied creatively to our undergraduate translation teaching with the constructivist teaching method, our translation teaching will be more efficient and fruitful.However, after referring to a great amount of literatures and an extensive survey, the author found that the research of translation criticism and its application to undergraduate translation teaching is nearly vacant. Therefore, the present thesis aims at testing the validity of the author's hypothesis through a quasi-experimental study, hoping that it can offer a source of reference for future translation teaching.This quasi-experiment study was divided into four stages: 1) Pre-test. The pre-test was carried out among all the English major juniors of Shandong Normal University, in order to select two proximate-level natural classes as the subjects of the experiment, one as the control group, and the other as the experimental group; 2) Application. In this process, the teacher and students of the experimental group conducted translation criticism with the constructivist teaching method in various forms; 3) Post-test. The post-test was conducted in the two groups at the end of the experiment to check the effectiveness of the application of translation criticism to undergraduate translation teaching; 4) Data Analysis. The collected data from both the experimental group and the control group were analyzed, compared and discussed before the findings were presented.The experiment indicated that it is effective to apply translation criticism to translation teaching and that the constructivist teaching method is feasible, too. That is, the author's hypothesis proved valid. Based on the experiment, the author explored some basic principles and methods of applying translation criticism for future use in class.And finally, findings of this study were concluded, meanwhile, some limitations were pointed out and suggestions for further research were proposed.