A School-based Study On The Difficulty In The Parallel Forms Of CET-6 Translation Assessment

Since 2013,College English Test Band 6(CET-6 hereafter)translation assessment has used the parallel forms for each administration.Identifying the difficulty of a translation test is important in translation teaching and translation textbook compilation.Previous literature mostly deals with translation difficulty in a linguistic view.At present,literature on translation difficulty is scarce,especially on the difficulty of the parallel forms of Chinese to English translation assessment.This thesis,on the basis of former studies,aims to explore whether there is any difference in the difficulty in the parallel forms of CET-6 translation assessment.This study adopts Sun's translation difficulty model(2012)as its major theoretical basis,and selects the three parallel forms of CET-6 translation assessment administered in December 2016.By using experiments and questionnaires,this paper focuses on answering the following three questions: 1)In terms of translation factors affecting translation difficulty,are there any differences in the difficulty of the three parallel forms CET-6 translation assessment? 2)In terms of translator factors affecting translation difficulty,are there any differences in the difficulty of the three parallel forms of CET-6 translation assessment? 3)How can one predict the translation difficulty without having a source text translated?The author conducts a simulation administration of CET-6 translation assessment on 56 sophomores who major in financial management and journalism at a foreign language university.In this experiment,subjects have to fill out questionnaires after they finish each translation.Questionnaires include mental workload survey as well as a post-translation survey.Two college English teachers who are experienced in translation and in rating major translation tests are invited to mark students' translation performance according to agreed criteria.Data collected are analyzed by SPSS so as to identify any differences in the translation difficulty of the three parallel forms in terms of both textual factors and translator factors and give possible reasons for those differences.Finally,this thesis works out an equation of translation difficulty in order to predict the difficulty without having a source text translated.Results show that first of all,no matter in terms of readability,translation quality score or translation difficulty score,there exist significant differences in translation difficulty among the three parallel forms of CET-6 translation assessment.Besides,error analyses indicate that the most frequent error categories are usage,syntax,spelling and mistranslation.This is consistent with results of the post-translation survey in which subjects all consider the following aspects that cause translation difficulty: difficult words and complex sentences.It is also found that there is a high correlation between pre-translation prediction score and translation difficulty score and hence an equation is worked out by SPSS.Since parallel forms are adopted in CET-6 translation assessment,it is necessary to ensure that the translation difficulty in the parallel forms is consistent.However,findings from this study show that there is a significant difference in the difficulty of the parallel forms of CET-6 translation assessment.This study may shed light on translation test construction,translation teaching and translation textbook compilation.