The Application Of Translation Workshop To Translation Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

The domestic research upon translation teaching (TT), in recent decades, has shown a trend of diversified development. Different researchers have been working hard to explore in depth a variety of effective teaching methods and strategies in order to optimize the process of teaching and further promote the quality of translation teaching, and the objective of doing so is mainly to cultivate a great many qualified translators for the sake of better suiting the demand of social development. Translation workshop (TW), since its early rising from a number of universities in the USA, has gradually grown into one practical teaching approach. Students under TW approach are often organized in groups to complete specific tasks in simulated translation atmosphere through mutual cooperation and exchange. Up to now, the new creative approach has been widely used at abroad. In contrast, the domestic research on TW seems little and superficial, though some scholars have begun to pay much attention to the innovative approach. And in translation teaching of China's higher education, the applied research on TW has to be further explored and validated.This research aims at the application of TW approach to translation teaching in higher vocational colleges, i.e. the focus of the research centers on the approach's applicability. For this reason, the author designed certain teaching steps and specific procedures in accordance with the characteristics of both TW and China's higher vocational education. In general, three major stages are involved. The first stage is the preparation stage, and instructors need to show learners much sample materials. If necessary, even some theoretical knowledge and translation techniques could be included. The second stage is the class management stage. Learners need to form small workshop in groups to collaborate and complete some practical translation tasks. The third stage is evaluation stage, and instructors in this stage should organize students to discuss and value the works of each group with a view to enhancing learners' translation competence. In TW approach, instructors should no longer dominant all learning activities, whereas students' behavior of active practice and mutual exchange, in particular their creative thinking and the improvement of translation competence, should be greatly valued and encouraged.To further verify the effectiveness of the approach in translation teaching of higher vocational colleges, relevant teaching experiment was designed by the author. The experiment consisting of 16 weeks was eventually carried out in Shandong Yincai College in the latter half of 2009. Subjects involved include 80 third-year students from School of Economics and Management of the college. The major of these students is Customs Declaration and International Freight and after graduation they have to seek jobs in positions related to foreign trade. Therefore, translation competence is quite crucial and necessary to them. Since the subjects are from two natural classes with each comprising 40 members, the author randomly chose one as the experiment class (EC) and the other as the control class (CC). Furthermore, two different teaching approaches were employed in the course of the experiment (TW approach for EC and traditional approach for CC).Such instruments as pre-test, post-test, questionnaires and interview were adopted in the teaching experiment, and the data collected from the experiment was carefully computed and analyzed through SPSS. As is shown from the analysis on relevant result of the experiment, TW approach could not only help stimulate learners' translation interests, but more importantly, promote the cultivation of learners' translation competence. On this basis, the author put forward some suggestions on the further application of the approach. To be frank, however, due to the restraint of current conditions and the authors' capability, the research has inevitably some limitations, e.g. the period for the experiment was relatively short; random sampling was not engaged and the processing and analysis of data was not enough in depth. Great efforts have to be taken to explore these issues later on.