| Over the past years, the traditional translation testing often adopts integrative tests in the form of sentence or paragraph translation, which proves to be inadequate to test students’ translation competence effectively. Due to its unclear purpose, narrow coverage and inappropriate test content in terms of the syllabus, it fails to check the translation knowledge and skills of the students. Xu Lina(1998: 29) pointed out in her paper that the single testing item in general can not test students’ theoretical knowledge in a systematic manner, as well as the ability to employ translation skills. Furthermore, such kind of testing item is incompetent to integrate with the corresponding translation teaching stage. Moreover, the scoring of the translation testing can not reflect the students’ true translation competence as it is often considered to be less reliable. As a matter of fact, the scoring description in the test tends to be so ambiguous, indistinct and non-specific that raters’ different knowledge background and personal preferences may directly influence the consistency and stability of the score. Besides, there is also much confusion between the concept of translation competence and translator competence. The test purpose of current translation testing, in most cases, is to check whether the test takers are qualified to be professional translators or interpreters, which is different from that in translation teaching. Pym(2002) proposed that translator competence is the knowledge and skills needed to be mastered when translators do translation, while translation competence is students’ ability cultivated through translation practice in language class. If people can not distinguish translator competence from translation competence, the content of the multi-component model(the competence structures proposed by scholars in translator competence) is likely to extend with the development of the society. Pym suggested that it is necessary to simplify the structure of translation competence as far as possible and further put forward a special kind of translation competence involving translation itself only.In this thesis, on the basis of the argumentation that translation competence can be decomposed into many sub-competences in the process of translation testing, a multi-items translation testing from the perspective of the discrete point test has been proposed. This study primarily investigates whether it is feasible to apply multi-items for translation competence test from the discrete point test perspective, how can multi-items test in translation competence testing be carried out and what the advantage of multi-items test in translation competence testing is. Moreover, it gives the advice on test scoring, especially the scoring on subjective items in order to reduce the subjectiveness in translation testing.110 undergraduate students majoring in English participated in the study and took two types of translation tests. At first, they took the traditional text test in which they were given two texts to translate from English to Chinese and Chinese to English within 60 minutes. Two weeks later, they took a multi-items test of the same texts, but in different testing items.The study shows that the results of two tests correlate in a positive manner, which means that the multi-items translation testing is applicable and effective in measuring the students’ translation competence. Meanwhile, both the designing and the scoring procedures of the multi-items translation testing have been suggested in the paper so as to guarantee the objectivity of the study. Some objective items, such as multiple choice, true/false, etc. are included for the reduction of the subjectiveness. In addition, 8 principles are adopted to ensure the reliability and effectiveness of the test. From the results of the study, it is clearly seen that the multi-items translation testing is more advantageous than the traditional text translation as it has an effective feedback on translation teaching and learning. |
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