A Study Of College English Translation Teaching From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the reform of College English Test and the promulgation of “College English Teaching Guide”, training non-English majors’ translation ability becomes more and more important. For a long time, college English translation teaching is secondary compared with listening, speaking, reading and writing teaching. And in the process of translation teaching, there exist the phenomena that the product of translation is valued, but the translation process is ignored, which are not conductive to improving the quality of college English translation teaching. With the reform and the development of college English teaching, exploring the college English translation teaching is of great significance to improve the quality of college English teaching.Taking relevance theory as the theoretical framework, this thesis makes a research on the current situation of college English translation teaching and checks out the feasibility and validity of the application of relevance theory to translation teaching for non-English majors. The present author did the questionnaire investigation on 206 freshmen from Xi’an Polytechnic University and randomly selected 8 teachers for interview to study the current situation of college English translation teaching. Then, the author intended to apply relevance theory to the translation teaching for non-English majors by launching a 14-week(56 teaching hours) long teaching experiment. The participants in the experiment are freshmen from two A-level classes, each class is composed of 49 students. The control class is taught in the traditional way, while the experimental class is taught under the guidance of relevance theory. The instruments utilized are one questionnaire(used both in pre-test and post-test), two translation tests(pre-test and post-test) and two interviews with students. After the teaching experiment, the present author collected the experimental data and conducted a detail statistical analysis by employing quantitative and qualitative research methods with the aid of SPSS 16.0.The results show that teachers are inclined to focus on translation skills teaching instead of translation theories and methods teaching in current circumstance. Affected by examination oriented, non-English majors are lack of the cognition to translation. Thus, the current situation of college English translation teaching needs to be improved. After the teaching experiment, it can be found that the application of relevance theory to translationteaching not only helps students obtain a more comprehensive understanding of translation itself and the translation process, but also improves their translation level. Thus, the relevance-theoretical translation teaching approach is proved to be feasible and effective.And it provides a new perspective and a strong theoretical support for translation teaching studies.