The Application Of Back Translation To College English Teaching

At home, even though there are no specific translation courses in the non-Englishmajors’ curriculum, the training of translation skills is still a focus and a difficulty inthe process of college English teaching. One of the problems that frequently occur instudents’ Chinese-English translations is that students are able to give grammaticallycorrect but unidiomatic English versions, in other words, Pidgin English, while inEnglish-Chinese translations, students’ Chinese versions usually appearEuropeanized.Back Translation refers to the process of translating backwards the finishedversion into the source language. Considering its special features, many Chinesetranslation experts have put forward the thought of applying Back Translation to theactual translation teaching and discussed heatedly about using Back Translationexercises to enhance students’ capacity of comparative analysis of English andChinese languages. The research question in this paper is whether this method canhelp students with their chinglish errors.Currently, the study on Back Translation remains on a theoretical stage.What’sworse, the theories in this particular field are limitedly patchy, which poses a bigfilibuster for those who are interested in this field of study. On the other hand, theempirical study of back translation is only an outlook of some researchers. Itspracticability and generality has not been verified, yet.The purpose of this study is to testify the effectiveness of back translationstrategy on reducing Chinglish and Europeanized Chinese errors in their translations.By a teaching experiment with back translation exercises combined with teaching ofcomparative disparity between English and Chinese, this study intends to figure outwhether back translation strategy has efficient function on enhancing students’consciousness about bilingual differences and reducing their Chinglish orEuropeanized Chinese versions in their translations.The teaching experiment was carried out with four procedures:1) Pre-test. Anexamination and a questionnaire were conducted among the450sophomore enrolled in the year of2010from Electronic Department of Shandong College of ElectronicTechnology to select two parallel classes with the most approximate translationcompetence, one as the experiment group, while the other as the comparison group,each with40subjects.2) Teaching Experiment. In the experiment group, the authoremployed back translation exercises combined with the teaching of contrastivedifferences between English and Chinese, while in the comparison group, students’translation exercises were followed with teachers’ comments and analysis in terms oflexis and basic translation skills.3) Post-test. A post-test examination, a questionnaireand an after-experiment interview were operated both in the experiment group and inthe comparison group to learn students’ change in awareness of Chinglish and PidginEnglish and possible errors and so on.4) Data Collection and Analysis. All the datawere collected and then analyzed in the quantitative and qualitative methods in orderto testify the effectiveness of the experiment.The analysis of data suggests that the awareness of bilingual disparity has beengreatly enhanced and the instinct to correct those chinglish mistakes in the translationversions has been vastly elevated among the students in the experiment group throughthe application of the back translation strategy. Compared with the control group, theexperiment group’s answers are not only more in accordance with grammar, but alsoare more idiomatic English and Chinese.At last, as to how to apply back translation to actual translation teaching moreefficiently and more effectively, the author has given her own suggestions, whichpoint out directions for future study. And deficiencies of the study were made clear,due to the lack of back translation research achievements for reference, uncontrollablevariables and other factors.