The Application Of Contrastive Analysis Theory To Chinese-English Translation Teaching In English Majors Of Vocational College

The domestic and overseas research on translation teaching, in recent decades,has revealed a trend of diversified development. Many researchers have beenworking hard to explore different kinds of teaching methods and translation theoriesto improve the quality of translation teaching. The main purpose of these studies isto cultivate a large number of qualified translators to meet the demands of socialdevelopment.Translation involves the activities of two languages, and contrastive analysisbetween these two languages is indispensable to translation teaching. The function ofcontrastive analysis theory (CAT) is to find the similarities and differences betweenthe mother tongue and the target language by comparing them, and then to solvelearners’possible difficulties and problems. Charles Fries (1945:9) first introducesCAT into foreign language teaching. Many researchers contrast two languages fromdifferent perspectives to discuss effective approaches to improve learner’s translationcompetence. However, the previous researches mainly regard literature and poetry asthe focus and pay more attention to the upperclassman with advanced level atuniversities. CAT has rarely been adopted into Chinese-English (C-E) translationteaching in vocational college. The author tries to put CAT into C-E translationteaching in vocational college and verify its feasibility and validity through aquasi-experimental study.The experiment lasting for 17 weeks was carried out in Shandong XinglinVocational and Technical College. It covers four stages: 1) Pre-test. Before theexperiment, the author conducted pre-test. Subjects are from four classes which theauthor teaches. The purpose is to testify students’translation competence and choosetwo classes with the same level as research subjects. The test scores indicated thatstudents’translation level of Class One and Class Two were almost the same. Theauthor randomly chose Class One as the controlled class (CC) and Class Two as theexperimental class (EC). There are 43 students in Class One and 41 students in Class Two. 2) Teaching process. The two classes had the same teaching materials andteaching hours, but the controlled class adopted traditional teaching method whilethe experimental class used CAT-based method. 3) Post-test. 17 weeks later, thepost-test was conducted in the two classes. In order to guarantee the validity, thedesign of the post-test was consistent with the pre-test in content, difficulty andstructure. 4) Questionnaire and interview. Questionnaire and interview were aimed atinvestigating students’translation interest and attitude towards translation teaching,translation learning and their harvest after one-semester’s learning.The author analyzed carefully all the data collected from the experiment. Theresult of the translation competence tests showed that the post-test score of theexperimental class was higher than that of the controlled class and the difference wassignificant. Besides, the results of questionnaire and interview implied that differentteaching methods led to students’different attitudes towards translation learning inthe two classes. More students in the experimental class were interested intranslation learning and students’overall translation performance in the experimentalclass was much better than that in the controlled class.In the end, the author summarized the study by describing some major findings,limitations and some suggestions for further studies.