An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Psycho-physiological Components And Translation Competence Of MTI Students

With the increasingly requirement for top professional translators in thedevelopment of different areas, Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) degreeemerges in that background. It has attracted wide attention to its education in recentyears. Many scholars have made deep researches to the training mode so as toeffectively improve the translation competence of MTI students and meet the needs ofthe growing translation market. Social development brings new requirements of thetimes to professional translators—the MTI students should not only have a clearunderstanding of the needs of the society, but also have a proper awareness of theirown translation competence and how to fully utilize those powers under differentmental or physical pressure. Thus it has great necessity to cultivate the students’mental or physical qualities. Although the study of translation competence is apriority area in many translation researches, mental or physical factors, as an essentialconstituent, haven’t been touched upon, especially by empirical methods.This study mainly conducts researches based on the definition of translationcompetence and the psycho-physiological components in their narrow sense. Itborrows the research of PACTE as well as some of my own studies, to make adescriptive analysis of40MTI students of Hunan University, in order to explore theirtranslation competence and the status quo of their psycho-physiological components.Based on students’ translation test performance, the research subjects are divided intotwo groups, namely the high-competence group and low-competence group, so as tobetter compare the difference of psycho-physiological components between the twogroups. Finally, this study analyzes the correlation between psycho-physiologicalcomponents and translation competence for the two groups respectively.This study is exploratory in empirical researches. First a translation test isconducted to get to know the students’ translation competence, then questionnairesare distributed and data will be collected when the questionnaires are finished, finallysoftware of SPSS for the correlation analysis will be done and the experimentalresults will be explored.The results of this study are as follows:(1) to quantify the translation quality ofstudents as a fraction, a detailed study subjects of40students were divided intohigh-competence group and low-competence group; through analysis to thequestionnaire of their competence, the status of MTI students’ overall competence is presented, there is a big gap between students in the strategic competence, bilingualcompetence and knowledge about translation competence.(2) Through analysis of theresults obtained by questionnaire on psycho-physiological components, the psycho-physiological components include cognitive components, attitudinal components andother capacity components, cognitive components covering memory, perception,attention and emotion; attitudinal components contain seven subordinate aspects:curiosity, perseverance, rigor, critical spirit, self-confidence, self-judgment andmotivation; the other capacity components include seven components: health, gender,logic synthesis, communication, analysis and creativity. Some gap is found betweenhigh level group and the low level group of students in self-confidence, logic ability,perseverance ability, integration capability and rigor ability. The first is the logicalgap, followed by self-confidence and perseverance ability, and then integrationcapability and rigor ability.(3) By correlation research between translationcompetence and psycho-physiological components the conclusion is made as follows:a correlation exists between translation competence and health, also betweentranslation competence and gender in low level students according to the analysis ofSpearson. There is a correlation between translation competence and the sixcomponents of high level students, which are the abilities of perseverance,self-confidence, rigor, health, gender and attention. And among them, theperseverance ability ranks the first.This study attempts to explore the correlation between translation competenceand psycho-physiological components, which has broadened, to some extent, thevision of translation education and enriched the research of translation ability as well.In addition, a questionnaire-based empirical research can be applied to translationteaching, which provides a new channel for the improvement of students’ ability andhave the reference for the teaching of translation theories and practices.