Error Analysis And Its Application In Vocational College English Major Translation Teaching

English majors of higher technical and vocational colleges are set up to meet the society’s demand for talents with applied competence, emphasizing the hand-on and practical operation capacities of the English language. Most vocational English majors are arranged according to the requirements in the job market, such as Hotel English major, Logistics English major, Business English major, and Applied English major and so on. The English major in Jingzhou Vocational College of Technology (JVCT) is entitled Applied English. Most of the students will work in the foreign trade field while some of them will become English teachers in middle schools after graduation. The translation course for this major gives priority to the translation theories and strategies and the teaching content is relevant to the translation skills of business letters, contracts, and advertisements and so on.The translation course for English major in JVCT is generally believed to be the most difficult teaching task for English teachers. The main causes for this phenomenon include students’ weak foundation of English, limited vocabulary of business English, and poor self-study abilities. Take the two classes, which are participating in this experiment, as an example, fewer than10%of the students got60points or more in college entrance examination in each class. One of the reasons why many students choose English as their major is that it is their family members’arrangement rather than their own interest; another reason for this is that the students are transferred from other majors because the college wants to increase the enrollment opportunity. Due to a fact that the motivation for learning English is not strong enough, very few students have a conscientious awareness of preparing or reviewing the translation knowledge in their spare time, which leads to a result that teaching effects are not satisfactory and a lot of mistakes are made in translation exercises.This thesis adopts the contrast teaching experiment for study. Applied English Class One of2009is chosen as the controlled class, Class Two as the experimental class. The author collects the errors from students’translation exercises for a whole semester. After each class period, the author collects the errors and analyzes them in order to find out the reasons why the students committed errors. With the guide of the error analysis theory, the author adjusts the teaching method and teaching content. Through the teaching experiment of a term, error analysis is proved to have fine results and to be worth applying, because students in the experimental class now make far less mistakes than their counterpart. Therefore a conclusion can be reached that it is an effective theoretical guidance for translation teaching in higher technical and vocational colleges.The study of error analysis started in1960s and developed in1970s. It is based on the contrastive analysis of linguists and language teaching specialists and transfers study focus from language environment to learners themselves. Avoiding and correcting mistakes all the time not being its teaching method, it not only classifies and analyzes learners’mistakes scientifically but also finds out the reasons seriously. Therefore, good understanding of students’traits can be achieved, and then students’ study skills and teachers’teaching effect can be improved accordingly.This thesis elaborates the error analysis theory and the author’s research in details in six chapters.Chapter One is the general introduction to the research.Chapter Two describes both the study domestic and abroad on error analysis and the theoretical background for this research.Chapter Three is the whole research process the analysis of the data collected from the experiment.Chapter Four describes the application of EA in the translation teaching process and the methods used in the error correction.Chapter Five describes the teaching implications the author draws from the research.Chapter Six is the conclusion, including the general review of the research and the limitation of the present study and suggestions for future research.