Theapplication Of Markedness Theory To Translation Teaching

The traditional translation teaching often focuses on translation skills and translation theories, that is to say, teachers explain translation skills and theories by analyzing some translation examples, and then give students homework to practice some particular translation skills, evaluate students'translation and finally present the sample translation. In this"analysis of source text- explanation- practice- correction"mode of translation teaching, teacher is the director and controller of classroom teaching activities and the absolute evaluator of students'translation work. Under this condition, teacher's personal subjective judgment is involved in teaching procedures and homework assessment. Additionally, the feedbacks of students'translation work are too abstract and general to transfer enough information to students. The subjective, unspecific and uncertain standard of translation evaluation is responsible for the lack of clear understandings of their own translation disadvantages of students, and eventually hinders students'improvements.With the intention to solve the above two problems in traditional translation teaching, this thesis applies markedness theory-based approach to translation teaching: firstly, in translation teaching procedure, teachers will make students analyze some features (such as text style, rhetoric, lexical feature and discourse structure) of source text and target text and teach translation skills based on the marked text. In using this kind of teaching approach, students can summarize features of a particular kind of text and grasp translation principles when they make translation after class. Secondly, on the translation evaluation, teachers evaluate students'work by comparing the strength and numbers of marked-items between source text and students'target text. Meanwhile, students can gain the direct, objective, quantitative feedbacks by Equivalence Value Table of Markedness (table 3.2). This kind of assessment approach helps students realize their own problems in translation and then produce more accurate and appropriate works later. In order to test whether the markedness theory can improve students'translation competence, this thesis does the literature research about markedness theory both home and abroad, and uses an experiment to prove the validity and feasibility of the application on the basis of theoretical foundations analysis. The experiment was carried out among 103 juniors who are divided into two groups (the experimental class and the control class) in foreign language college of Linyi Normal University for one semester. Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted in the experiment, including two tests, one questionnaire, interviews and class observation. Both experimental class and control class took the two tests, questionnaire and class observation, but interviews were only conducted among students in experimental class.Through the analysis of data obtained from the experiment, we can clearly see that the scores of post-test in experimental class are higher compared to control class, indicating that students in experimental class are more competent in translation than those of control class after one semester training. Beside that, about the experimental class, the scores of post-test are more centered than pre-test, which indicates the polarization is alleviated in a certain degree. Through class observation, it was found that students in experimental class are more active and more willing to talk in class, their study initiatives are increased significantly as the experiment processed.Therefore, this thesis drew a conclusion that the application of markedness theory to translation teaching can improve students'translation abilities by analyzing the texts in a detailed way and presenting direct and objective feedbacks to students.Although markedness theory had been applied to many aspects of English teaching, this thesis is a tentative study of introducing markedness theory to translation teaching which deserves more studies. The author hopes there will be more researches in this field and this thesis would be helpful to further studies.