An Application Of Translation Workshop To Minority English Majors’ Translation Learning

In recent years, the quantity and quality of translators have been faced with great challenges, due to the rapid development of social economy and the frequent connection between countries. According to The New Curriculum Standard, students should be able to master five basic English skills ’listening, speaking, reading, writing, translating’, instead of the previous four skills ’listening, speaking, reading, writing’. As a result, translation teaching shoulders the task of training massive qualified translators for the society, and it is very helpful to cultivate students’ comprehensive linguistic ability. However, in practical teaching, most teachers still use the traditional teaching method, which focuses on translation theories and translation drills in the textbook, so translation teaching is not closely associated with the society and cannot meet the social requirements. For the graduates, they could not adapt to the job very quickly. This empirical study attempts to look into the problems that Minority English majors come across in their translation learning, and tries to improve their translation competence through translation workshop, a very advocated teaching approach in Western countries and in Taiwan, Hong Kong.The thesis, based on a teaching experiment lasting for four months, has made an investigation on the current situation of Minority English majors’ translation learning. The two research questions involved in this paper are:1. What are the factors that influence Minority English majors’ translation learning? 2. Can TW (translation workshop) improve learners’ translation competence? The thesis is based on cooperative learning theory, autonomous learning theory and constructivism learning theory. Cooperative learning theory emphasizes interaction among students and teachers. Autonomous learning theory focuses on the learners’ self-regulation and self-assessment in learning process. Constructivism learning theory mainly refers to individual constructivism and social constructivism. Individual constructivism cares much about the interaction between personal experience and external stimuli, which is a construct of one’s internal knowledge; while social constructivism holds that language is constructed by the learners’ social interaction and collaboration. Based on the three theories, the author tries to improve Minority students’ translation competence using translation workshop, and expects to find out the answers to the research questions through the empirical study.The subjects of this research are twenty Minority English majors of Grade Two from Yi Li Normal College, who are undergraduates with the same level (only Uyghur nationality, Kazak nationality and Hui nationality). The two classes, ten students from each class, are taught by the author of this thesis and the textbooks for them are the same. The only difference is that the author adopts the new teaching approach in Class 4, while Class 2 is still taught in the traditional method. The research instruments used in the study are as follows:two tests before and after the experiment, questionnaires, interview and the author’s classroom observation. The interview and questionnaire Ⅰ are used to answer the first question, and tests (pre-test is used to test whether the classes are at the same level for the purpose of the accuracy of the experiment), questionnaire Ⅱ, and the classroom observation are designed to test the effectiveness of the new teaching approach.Through analysis of the results of the experiment, one could make the following conclusions:First, three main factors influence Minority English majors’ translation learning:leaning interest and motivation, low English proficiency, cultural difference. Second, translation workshop as a new teaching approach can arouse students’ learning interest and promote their translation competence. Finally, the author hopes this study could provide some useful references and suggestions for the future research.