A Functionalist Approach To Translator Training In China

With its further opening up to the world and improvement of its internationalimage, China has deepened its cooperation with other countries in politics, economy,technology, culture and education. Its increasingly frequent interaction with theoutside world puts a great demand for professional translators and interpreters.Nowadays, translation activities have gone beyond literary texts; instead, manypractical texts need to be translated, such as law, technology, medicine,advertisement and so on. Translating activity is becoming a professional industry.Although translation study and translation practice have a long history inChina, professional training of translators in China is still an emerging industrywhere exist some defects either in aspect of its program objectives, course syllabus,teaching materials or teaching methods. The Skopos theory, born during the processof translator training in Germany, has bypassed the framework of literary translationversus free translation and translatability versus untranslatability disputed by thelinguistic scholars for hundreds of years; instead, it regards translating activities froma brand new angle of view, considering the purpose of target text as the ultimate goalof the translating activity. Therefore, it is appropriate to analyze the problems oftranslator training from the perspective of Skopos theory. In order to avoid talking ingeneralities, the analysis of problems and solutions proposed in this thesis are allbased on a specific example of translator training.This thesis attempts to analyze the problems of translator training in Chinabased on the example of MTI education in Southwest University from thefunctionalist approach and makes a tentative suggestion on the improvement oftranslator training. I hope that my efforts made in this thesis will contribute to thecause of translator training in China.