On the Problems and Measures of Translation Teaching for English Majors in China

Abstract

Abstract-Translation acts as a key course among the courses of English major and plays an important role in sharpening the students' comprehensive ability to use languages in institutions of higher learning. However, in recent years, a majority of students have made it known that they achieved no good results in translation course, in which more or less problems exist. In order to find out the problems of translation teaching, this paper had a sample survey on 250 third-year students of English majors in West China universities about their response to translation teaching. With the analysis of the questionnaire, three problems have been found, and the paper finally gave some countermeasures and suggestions in the hope of attaining the goal of high quality translation teaching. To keep pace with the times, the paper also held the idea that Internet Aided Translation should be concluded in translation teaching and it also gave new ways of doing translation with the help of the Internet.

Measuring Chinese Undergraduate English Majors’ Motivation to Learn Translation in Higher Education Translation Courses

“…Many studies have pointed out the drawbacks of this conventional method, in particular its negative impacts on students' motivation to learn (Duan, 2009;Kiraly, 2014;Qin, 2017;Zhu, 2016). For instance, the conventional method renders students into passive receivers of knowledge, allows only unidirectional interaction from teacher to students, and reduces peer interaction, if any, to almost nil (Kiraly, 2014).…”

“…In addition, the method fails to reflect changes taking place in the translation education field, where technology and the Internet play an increasingly important role in assisting in the translation learning process (Zhu, 2016). That helps explain why in one survey administered to 250 third-year English majors, over 60% of the respondents expressed strong dissatisfaction with the teaching method as they found the course dry and irrelevant to the market needs (Qin, 2017). In words, the translation classroom dominated by this traditional teaching method is decontextualized and falls short of stimulating interest, establishing relevance, building up confidence, and generating satisfaction among students themselves, and therefore is not motivating.…”