Application Of Back-translation In Teaching Translation To Vocational School Students

Articles issued by Ministry of Education of China describe the goal of vocational education as “to cultivate the first-lined, high-level practical and specialized talents who are adapted to offer production, construction, management and service”(2006). However, Vocational education, as a part of higher learning in China, is going through a hard time of self-development. How to rouse the vocational school students eagerness of learning English has become a question that many scholars are trying to solve. The author of this thesis works in a vocational college in Taiyuan, Shanxi, where Chinese-English translation course is compulsory for the English majors. For a long time the teaching and learning of translation is heavily relied on the content and structure of the textbook, which can be very difficult for the students to follow. What is taught in translation lectures often includes a brief introduction of translating theories, a detailed explanation and training of translation skills and several minutes for exercises. This way of delivering lectures, which can be boring and needs great concentration of students, may not be well adapted to the students in vocational schools, who are generally weak English learners. As a response to the present situation, the author puts forward the idea of back-translation or reverse-translation of Chinese into English in vocational English teaching to see whether it is effective for the students to learn translation.A “back-translation” is the translation of a translated text back into the language of the original text. Comparison of a back-translated text with the original text is done here and by comparing the two texts it is hoped to improve the translating competence of back-translators.In the empirical research of back-translation, authentic and idiomatic English text (original text) was found first, and then the text was translated into corresponding idiomatic Chinese (target text) by well-trained translator and finally the Chinese text (target text) was reversely translated back into English text (back-translated text). Now by comparing the back-translated text, which was English, with the original English text, we were to find to what extent the two English texts were similar and to what extent they were different. If they were similar, that showed what we had done was acceptable and we could safely go on with the rest; if they were different, we would examine what had made the differences happen.To do the study, a bilingual reading book called “bookworm series” was used as the “textbook” because there were both the original English text written by native writer and the corresponding Chinese translation, meeting the need of “original text” and “target text”. Because the textbook was actually a long story, generally the students were interested and didn t get bored in class. The teacher, instead of giving translating knowledge directly, gave the translating skills and related theories by comparing the students translation work with the original English text.Each student s translation work of the Chinese text in the story book was marked and given a score weekly according to the proficiency of uses of translating skills that were supposed to be trained in class. With a complete record of scores achieved in different items of skills, statistical analyses would be done to check whether the participants had made progress as the weeks went by, and further to evaluate the feasibility of the new method of teaching translation course.The study showed:1) the teaching method of back-translation that the author adopted was generally effective;2) the participants achieved great progress in learning skills of “tense awareness”,“passive/active voice”,“attributive clause”,“adverbial clause” and “noun clause”; however, it took hard time for them to learn some other skills of “word choice”,“extension”,“conversion”,“amplification” and “translating short clauses”. Besides, the methods of “omission”,“repetition” and “commendatory or derogatory sense” were not frequently used in real translating practice although they were of great importance as well.Lastly, the author also suggests:1) translation teaching for vocational school students should be interesting and flexible.2) hard work and broad knowledge are very important in the process of learning translation.