Text Type Theory And Its Application To Translation Teaching

With the development of translation teaching, the teaching of text types has become more and more important. However, as far as the situation of domestic translation teaching is concerned, teachers tend to emphasize theoretical explanation, with far less attention paid to the cultivation of text type awareness. Many students put more efforts on the learning of translation theories, but ignore different translation strategies in accordance with different text types during the process of translation. As a result, students'translation abilities fail to meet the needs of the society. Some scholars in the traditional and linguistic approaches have done some researches on the text type translation, but their opinions are fragmentary, and sometimes even unconscious. The functional approach is not the same as them, and its theory is relatively systematic. Many translators and linguists try to find appropriate translation approaches in terms of text functions and text types. Among them, Newmark is one of the most influential representatives.In China, the combined study of text type theory and translation has been promoted by some linguists and translation researchers in a moderate quantity, but it is still rare to apply text type theory to translation teaching. Considering the current situation, the present study attempts to explore how Newmark's text type theory and its corresponding strategies are conducted in the teaching of translation. On the basis of Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation strategies, the author describes the translation strategies and approaches of three representative texts, including authoritative statements, commercial advertisement and news. Through the analysis of three kinds of representative texts, the author intends to enable students and teachers to understand that different text types with different functions call for respective strategies and approaches to translation.In order to check out the feasibility and validity of the text type-based teaching approach in translation teaching, this thesis reports a quasi-experiment in the college English translation course for about 16 weeks. The participants in the experimental study are 91 juniors of English major from two natural classes of Shandong Xiehe Vocational and Technical College, one of which is composed of 45 students, and the other is composed of 46 students. The author casually chooses the former as the experimental class, and the latter as the control class. The instruments utilized in this study are composed of four parts in general,including two translation tests, the teaching experiment, one questionnaire(used both in pre-test and post-test) and an interview. There are two tests in the experiment—pre-test and post-test. By analyzing the results of the tests, the experiment is to testify the effect of text type-based teaching approach on cultivating students'translation competence. By analyzing the results of the questionnaire, it is to testify the effect of text type-based teaching approach on improving learners'text type awareness, translation attitudes and translation interests. Some subjects in the experimental class are given an interview about their English translation practice after the post-test. On the basis of the empirical study, the thesis mainly solves the following problems: (1) Whether the text type-based teaching approach can develop students'interest and change their attitudes towards English translation; (2) Whether the text type-based teaching approach can cultivate students'text type awareness; (3) Whether the text type-based teaching approach can improve students'translation abilities.According to the analysis of the statistics processed by SPSS from the results of the experiment, the text type-based teaching approach is confirmed to be feasible and effective in college English translation class. Text type-based teaching experiment not only helps to develop students'text type awareness, but also makes a contribution to the development of their interests in learning translation and the improvement of their translation competence.To sum up, the thesis has presented a quasi-experiment on translation teaching in college English translation course. According to the major findings of the teaching experiment, the author provides some pedagogical suggestions for college English translation teaching.