A Study On The Interactive Model Of Translation Teaching For English Majors

As Mu Lei pointed out in her Research on Chinese Translation Teaching, forEnglish majors, their language level is demonstrated in the proficiency of translationand interpretation, which reveal the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.The importance of translation can be inferred from Mu Lei’s remarks, or to be moreexact, translation teaching is of great importance.For a long period of time, translation teaching for undergraduate English majorshas been adopting the teacher-centered model based on the behaviorist theory. In theteacher-centered class, the teacher lectures while students take notes. This approachdoes well in transmitting a great deal of knowledge and information in a short time;however, it does badly in inspiring students’ independent and creative thinking, whichprevents students from improving their translation competence. What’s more, thisteaching approach can hardly meet the requirements of the society and it fails toimprove students’ translation competence effectively, whereas the student-centeredinteractive approach helps to solve this problem.This paper puts forward two hypotheses:1) The interactive approach is moreeffective than the teacher-centered approach in improving students’ translationcompetence;2) The interactive approach is able to increase students’ translationinterest and provoke positive attitudes towards translation learning.Based on constructivist theory, the interactive approach is proposed to beimplemented in translation course.In this paper, the author demonstrates the two hypotheses through an experimentand a questionnaire respectively.60out of69English majors in XISU (They are allsophomores from School of English Education) were chosen as the subjects of theexperiment. Then the60students were divided into two groups---the experimentalclass and the control class. With the same teacher and the same teaching materials, theformer adopted the interactive approach while the latter employed theteacher-centered method for a period of two months. A pre-test before the experimentand a post-test after the experiment were taken by both the experimental class and the control class. With completion of the experiment, the scores of the tests wereanalyzed by SPSS V18.0.According to the results of the post-test, both the experimental class and thecontrol class have made progress in translation competence. Nevertheless, there arevisible differences between the mean scores of the experimental class and the controlclass. Students in the experimental class have achieved relatively much more progressin the improvement of overall translation competence.From the analysis of the results of post-study questionnaire, it indicates thatstudents in the experimental class with the interactive model are more interested inEnglish translation than those in the control class with the teacher-centered model.Therefore, it is safe to say that the interactive model is more effective than theteacher-centered model in improving students’ translation competence and that theinteractive model is able to increase students’ translation interest and provoke positiveattitudes towards translation learning.