In Search Of A New Approach To Translator Education

The field of translation studies as a whole has witnessed great developments in recent years. Among these, one of the most prominent trends is towards Descriptive Translation Studies. In DTS, translation is no longer viewed as a static process of text transfer from the source language to the target language, but as a dynamic process combining many other factors, such as text purpose, sponsorship, readership, etc. However, in the field of translation teaching, or translator education, the conventional approach still dominates the field.In the conventional approach, translation teaching is conducted in such a manner that translation is seen as static knowledge and teaching as merely a transfer of that knowledge. The weaknesses of this conventional methodology are obvious and therefore other methodologies need to be explored.This study, drawing on current insights and empirical data through a number of means (e.g. academic journals, experiment, survey, etc.), tries to adopt a corpus-based approach to search for a new approach to translation teaching, or translator education. This research contains mainly two parts. The first one is theoretical reasoning and the second part involves an empirical study. In the first part, it is proposed that corpus-based translation teaching has the following advantages. First, it is in line with the social constructivist learning theory. Second, corpus should be seen as a translation performance-enhancement tool and at the same time, the skill of using corpus should also be incorporated as one important component of translation competence in this new electronic era. The second part of this research mainly consists of the introduction of a self-compiled corpus, a translation experiment and a survey. In this part, it is found out that despite some deficiencies of corpus-based translation teaching and learning, corpus can be auseful tool for student translators in several respects. First, the parallel bilingual corpus is much more useful than bilingual dictionaries and it should not be seen as an enlarged bilingual dictionary. Second, students show more confidence and resourcefulness in rendering translations with the help of corpus. The translation experiment, to some extent, attests to our hypothesis that corpus is a useful tool in translation teaching and learning as a whole.