An Investigation Into Translation Competence Of English Translation Majors

Translation competence as one of the most important concepts and difficult skills for Englishtranslation majors in the field of English translation teaching is a comprehensive competence. In the earlyperiod, translation competence was regarded as a single language competence. With the understanding andresearch of translation competence, now it is regarded as a comprehensive and complex competence whichconsists of a lot of skills and factors.The connotation of translation competence is discussed in the thesis which is based on CATTI(China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters—CATTI) model, and then the conclusion isdrawn: language competence including vocabulary, pragmatic and grammar competence, transfercompetence of sentence structure, comprehension, contextual, subject knowledge, cultural competence andtranslation theory formed all aspects of translation competence.Papers of Level-3translation competence are utilized to test the candidates from GradeThree—English translation majors in a certain normal university. Next questionnaires are used to explainthe test results. Here are the results:Pass rate is very low:just18.18﹪. Overall level of translation competence of English translationmajors is poor. The following questions exist in the test paper: Synonyms are used mistakenly; transfercompetence of long sentence structure is deficient; phenomena of world for world translation are universal;Contextual consciousness is weak.The factors that caused the situation are found out through questionnaire:㈠for students thereare two reasons:①,They lack enough translation exercises. Most of the candidates emphasize their effortson theoretical study of translation; practices of translation are involved very rare. Translation as a kind ofskill can be improved by a lot of exercise.②,basic knowledge of English of the candidates is poor. Smallvocabulary, weak competence to discriminate Synonyms and bad Mastery of irregular verbs is mainlymanifested.㈡for translation teaching, there exist some questions as unclear training objectives, andbackward teaching methods.㈢translation competence itself is very complex. A lot of literature andempirical research festinates that translation competence is comprehensive and complex. In the end, some suggestions like teaching position, teaching content, and teaching methods areput forward...