An Empirical Study On Selection Of Translation Units By Think-Aloud Protocols

Translators need to look for proper translation units constantly when translating, so it is a must in translation studies. Since the 1980s, translation studies begin to concentrate on the investigation of translation unit. However, most of these studies purely discuss to select which linguistic units as the proper translation units and are mostly based on linguisitic theories. With the development of translation process studies, more and more scholars investigate translation units from a process-oriented perspective. One of the most important researches is to conduct empirical studies via thinking-aloud protocols, which creates a new angle for investigating translation units.Based on the Triangulation Module (think-aloud protocols, questionnaires and translation analysis), this thesis attempts to explore the inner thinking processes of 8 Chinese translators (6 students and 2 professionals) when they translate an English source text into Chinese and to answer the following three questions: What are the differences and similarities between student and professional translators in terms of translation sub-processes? What are the differences and similarities between student and professional translators in terms of translation unit selection? What constitutes translation expertise in reference to the different performance of student and professional translators in translation sub-processes and translation unit selection? Why?The translators go through the sub-processes of planning, comprehending, transferring and revising, linearly and recursively. By analyzing the think-aloud protocols, it is found that most of the cognitive moves for both groups of subjects are devoted to transferring, which very reflects the specific feature of translation. However, the professionals engage in pre-transferring moves more than the students do. They spare more time in planning the whole translation process and comprehending the meaning and rhetorical function of the source text other than the linguisitic forms.The professional translators differ from the student translators in terms of translation unit selection, too. First of all, translation units selected by the student and professional translators, synthesis units in particular, are not consistent throughout the whole translation process. However, the professionals have higer-level translation units (analysis units and synthesis units). In other words, professionals select sentence and above-sentence for analysis wheares students select phrase and clause. As for synthesis unit, professionals transfer at the level of sentence or clause and even above-sentence. The students, on the other hand, can only transfer on the level of below-sentence. So the professionals have macrostructural maps of the source text and the target text, therefore they are more capable of solving the specific translation problems and ruling bigger translation units.The translation expertise is identified in terms of translation process and translation unit. As for translation process, professsinals role as analyzer of the text function, constructor of text meaning, engineer of target text and monitor of the entire performance. In reference to translation units, professionals select high-level analysis units, so as to boast a macrostructural map of the source text and select high-level synthesis units, so they are more capable of solving specific translation problems in the task. Besides, professionals take text as their reference units; they read and try to apprehend the source text on the whole. Even when starting with actual translating, they read through the whole paragraph to be translated.By comparing the different performances of student and professional translators in terms of translation process and selection of translation unit and identifying the translation expertise, the current study are to provide some suggestions for future translation teaching.