A Correlation Research On Graduate Students' Critical Thinking Consciousness In Translation And Their Translation Competence

Thinking is the heart and spirit of language,and language is the theoretical and practical basis of translation.Translation functions as a kind of conversion of two languages,including not merely the linguistic transition,the transformation of thinking as well.Therefore,critical thinking(CT)consciousness is extremely necessary in this process.When engaged in translation activities,the translator is able to train and cultivate his or her critical thinking consciousness,and improve CT.Translation and CT can be mutually promoted and enhanced.The cultivation of CT is one of the goals of translation teaching,which has become the current consensus of education in China,therefore,enhancing CTCT is essential to improve the overall quality and development of graduate students.The research attempts to design a questionnaire of CTCT in accordance with translation practice according to the theory of CT.and aims to explore the definition and composition of CTCT.verifies the impact of majors and genders on translation competence,finds out the correlation between CTCT and graduate students'translation results,and ultimately improves their translation skills and competence by enhancing translators' CTCT.The paper mainly focuses on CTCT and is based on translation practices.Compared with translators' CT and CTCT,the author intends to define CTCT as the ability to analyze the source text,choose the proper translating strategy,assess the translation quality and reflect upon the translation process,summarize useful translating points under the guidance of translation standards,and gradually cultivate the translator's personality traits in translation practice,such as persevering and rigorous,open-minded and tolerant,independent and innovative.Through the tests and analyses of the questionnaires,the author determines the five basic factors of CTCT,namely,the ability to analyze and assess translation texts,the ability to accumulate translation knowledge,the ability to apply translation standards,the consciousness for translation innovation and the cultivation of translators' personality traits,which will be the key evidences to verify and analyze the proposed hypothesis and three relevant questions.The research contains three stages.First,the questionnaire was designed by using the English CTCT scale and then conducted by graduate students.Second,the English-Chinese and Chinese-English sentence translation tests were designed and the four tests were given within the limited time.Third,the interview questions were designed and subjects to be interviewed were picked up and then the whole interview was conducted.The author took the above five factors as the basic points and analyzed the questionnaire data by the method of independent sample T-test by applying the SPSS(Statistic Package for Social Science)software.Besides,the author also analyzed the transferred texts of the interview and the scores of the English-Chinese and Chinese-English sentence translation tests.The hypothesis of this paper is that there is correlation between CTCT and English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation results.By verifying this hypothesis,the author would try to answer the following questions:1.What is the overall level of graduate students' CTCT?2.Do different majors influence students'CTCT?3.Do genders influence CTCT?The results show that the five factors were significantly and positively correlated with the results of graduate students' English-Chinese and Chinese-English sentence translation test scores in general,that is,graduate students' CTGT is highly relative to their bilingual translation level and their translation competence,therefore,graduate students should first cultivate their own CTCT if they hope to improve the translation competence.Graduate students in English major had a higher level of CTCT than those in Science and Engineering majors.Girls' CTCT was normally slightly higher than that of boys.Therefore,a good method of cultivating graduate students' translation competence through translators' CTCT can effectively improve their CT.In addition,comparisons between groups showed some differences exist between genders and majors,which can provide some inspiration for translation teaching and practice.However,there exists the interaction between majors and genders,and the mechanism of its interaction remains to be further investigated.