On Teacher And Student Translators' Self-Revision

Traditional study interest of translation process centers on text analysis.Now it shifts to the emphasis on studying translators' mental activities,a long overlooked field by previous researches.Interdisciplinary cooperation provides unconventional study tools.These tools help academics go as far as they could manage.We call it experimental study for researchers of this field tend to utilize experimental methodologies to unveil the mysteries of translators' "black box".For many years,the effect of using experiments to observe translators has only been pursued by western world.Experimental awareness has not awaken in China's translation community until the start of the 21th century.As validity of this method has been proved by many academics like Lorcher with relentless hard-work,scholars in China are facing an abnormal situation in that criticism has been given too much stress whereas the experimental studies attract little attention.To fertilize this field,the present study has initiated an experimental research by comparing self-revision between teacher and student translators,with assistance of think-aloud protocol,translog software(a software to record keystrokes and screen activities)and questionnaire.Three student translators and two teacher translators have offered to participate in this research.The research involves a series of experiments.The 5 participants have been asked to translate an English text into Chinese on translog,meanwhile they need to report whatever goes on in their mind during their translating process.The researcher has made a questionnaire survey after each translating task.TAPs data,together with the data from translog and questionnaire serves as three main sources of the study.The coding methods in this thesis are designed as follows:1)Phase coding.Translation phases in this thesis are classified in accordance with Edmund's(2005)study.In his definition,translation phases could be categorized as "pre-drafting","drafting" and "post-drafting".And self-revision is a behavior that would occur in any of these three phases.2)Unit coding.In unit coding,we put the revision into word,phrase and sentences categories,by taking reference to the principle of Zhao Ren(2004),who stated in her study on the similarities and differences of student and teacher translators,as well as her principle about translation motives from linguistic,conceptual and rhetorical levels.3)Strategy coding.The strategy coding is based on translation strategies in a translating process put forward by Gerloff'(1922),as most other researches on strategies would do.In fact,there are 4 main revision strategies and 11 sub-strategies in this research.Strictly following the three coding methods,we are hoping to make an overall analysis of self-revision modes and to shed some light on the study of translating process.With the objectives to explore teacher and student translators' translating process,particularly their self-revision,by concentrating on phases,units and strategies of self-revision,the author of this thesis has acquired the following findings:1)The majority of revision attempts take place in drafting phase of translating for both teachers and students(the other two phases are pre-drafting and post-drafting).With regard to revision distributions in drafting phase,the teachers' revisions frequently concentrate on several main parts of the text while students' would have less concentration.And teachers' revision time might be shorter than the students';2)In terms of revision unit,the students need larger segments to support their correcting work than their counterparts---teachers.In addition,the teachers' revisions tend to focus on conceptual and rhetorical levels while the students on linguistic and conceptual levels;3)As for revision strategies,teachers would be more likely to apply inferring and confirming techniques as well as editing technique to polish their translating products while students appear less likely in the application of these techniques.What's more,students more frequently resort to storage and extraction strategies,accompanied by searching and selecting ones to make their corrections,as illustrated by their great dependence on dictionaries and repeating their revision contexts.This thesis has viewed self-revision as an important step in translating process.By comparing the similarities and differences of self-revision between teacher and student translators,the author of this thesis intends to arouse more interests in self-revision research and to further explore process-oriented study in translation,and to shed some light on future study of its kind.