An Empirical Study On MTI Students’ Self-assessment Competence Of Translation

The advancement of society has witnessed the rising demand for high-level andprofessional translators. Against this background, MTI(Master of translation andinterpreting), as a newly independent discipline, has been established. In recent years,it attracts great attention. Many scholars have tried to study the pedagogical models oftranslator training, aiming at improving the translation competence of MTI students tomeet the demand of the market. Since the development of the society puts forward newrequirements on professional translation, it is necessary for MTI students to understandclearly the needs of the society, their own translation proficiency. Besides, there is aneed for them to have a good knowledge on how their products are assessed and how toassess their own products. Therefore, it is significant to develop students’self-assessment competence of translation. Although translation competence hasalways been one of the key areas in translation studies, self-assessment competence, asone of the sub-competences of which, has been rarely studied. Upon a comprehensivereview of translation competence and translation assessment, this thesis studiesself-assessment competence of translation in a broad and a narrow sense, respectively.According to the social background and characteristics of MTI, the present study alsobuilds a model of self-assessment competence of translation for MTI students.First, the study mainly explores the definition of self-assessment competence in anarrow sense. Then the study tries to investigate the current situation of MTI students’self-assessment competence, followed by analyzing the correlations among thesub-competences of self-assessment competence and the specific differences betweenhigher-competence(top10%in high scores) and low-competence group(top10%inlow scores) which are divided based on students’ SAC. Finally, the relationshipbetween self-assessment competence and translation quality is also investigated.The methods of empirical and exploratory research are combined in the study. Byanalyzing the data collected through the questionnaires on MTI students, the studydiscusses the results of the data.The main conclusions of the research are:(1)In a narrow sense, self-assessmentcompetence can be divided into language assessment competence, extra-linguisticassessment competence, functional assessment competence, real-time editingcompetence.(2)The current situation of self-assessment competence of41MTIstudents is presented in a descriptive way. Only14.6%of them know how to judge and from what perspectives to revise and correct their work, who can reach over80%accuracy; the accuracy of12.2%students is less than60%with a poor ability ofself-assessment;31.7%students have an accuracy between60%—70%and41.5%have an accuracy between70%—80%, who don’t have a clear and comprehensiveknowledge of assessment.(3)There are significant correlations betweenself-assessment competence and its sub-competences. Among them, real-time editingcompetence is most sensitive to the self-assessment competence. Through comparisonbetween high-competence and low-competence group, it is found that the difference inlanguage assessment competence is greatest, followed by functional assessmentcompetence, real-time editing competence, extra-linguistic assessment competence.(4)As for the correlation between self-assessment competence and translation quality,self-assessment competence has the biggest correlation coefficient with TQ, followedby real-time editing competence, language assessment competence, functionalassessment competence and extra-linguistic assessment competence.The study attempts to explore self-assessment competence of translation, to someextent, which enriches the studies on TC and broadens the horizon of developing TC.Besides, the research results can be applied to translation teaching. Therefore, thestudy is also significant as a probe into an important aspect of translation pedagogy,theoretically and practically.