A Text-oriented Holistic Approach To Translation Teaching For English Majors Of Vocational Colleges

Translation teaching for English majors is one of the major tasks of the English teachers at vocational colleges. According to The Requirements of English Course for Higher Vocational Education, students'translation competence should be achieved Level A or Level B. Level A requires that students understand correctly English texts of medium difficulty and translate them into Chinese appropriately. Level B requires that students translate English texts of less difficulty correctly. However, actually, there is a gap between the real translation competence of the students and the requirements.As the author investigates among the sophomores of English majors in a vocational college, most of the problems they encounter in their translation practice are concerned with their lack of proper understanding of the source text, its overall structure in particular. One reason is that the traditional translation teaching focuses mainly on words, phrases or sentences, and the macro-structure of the source text is usually ignored by the translation teachers in their daily teaching. In fact, the students seldom analyze the source text from a macro-structural perspective. They fail to understand the author's intention and the train of thoughts, and are also unable to know the characteristics of the source texts as well as the author's writing features. All these do have affected the quality of their translation practice. This research, therefore, aims to find out a more efficient teaching approach to improve the translation competence of vocational college students, i.e. a text-oriented holistic approach based on discourse analysis.This empirical research mainly consists of two parts. The first part aims to find out the major problems that face the vocational college students in their translation practice. A questionnaire survey was carried out by the author first. And with some thoughts on the results of the questionnaire survey, the author believes that the proper understanding of the common textual patterns may help students much in their translation practice. Then, a text-oriented holistic approach to translation teaching is considered a possible solution. In the second part, the author makes an experiment to testify to the feasibility of using this new teaching model. The major findings of this research are the following:1) There are obvious advantages and feasibility of taking such a text-oriented holistic approach to the translation teaching for English majors at vocational colleges.2) The text-oriented holistic approach and the traditional approach to translation teaching prove to be complementary to each other.3) The text-oriented holistic approach to translation teaching does benefit the vocational college students and their translation competence is improved.