An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Translation Meta-cognitive Regulation And Translation Competence

Translation is by nature a psychological and cognitive process, and meta-cognition is an important concept in cognitive psychology. So it can be applied to the field of translation, which is not only conducive to the development of translation discipline, but also provides a theoretical basis for translation teaching. In addition, meta-cognitive regulation can affect the process of transcoding the original to the target text and enable the translator regulate and improve their translation activities according to their meta-cognition, which may improve the quality of the translation. Therefore, it is a feasible way to borrow the related results and methods from psychology to study the translator's psychology activities in the translation process. Questionnaire, TAP, translation test and follow-up interviews are administered to the subjects of the experiment,which tries to find the different meta-cognitive regulation used by the professional translators and the student translators and the correlation between translation meta-cognitive regulation and translation competence. The results can provides thesis base for translation teaching and the current study is intended to answer the following research questions:1) what constitutes translation meta-cognitive regulation?2)what is the meta-cognitive regulation standard of professional translators and student translators? What's the difference? Why? 3)How is the meta-cognitive regulation correlated to translation competence for professional translators and student translators respectively?There are 85 participants divided into two groups: the students group consisting of 65 undergraduates majoring in English, and the professional translators group consisting of 20 professional translators working in the company. Think-aloud method is used to collect data from participants'self-reporting of their mental process, complemented with retrospective reports; translation competence and follow-up interviews are gathered to be my data sources. These data after being coded and analyzed provide different evidences to describe the differences of translation meta-cognitive regulation used by translators (student translators and professional translators). The correlation between translation meta-cognitive regulation and translation competence may contribute to the constitution of translation teaching.The present study has the following findings: 1) Translation meta-cognitive regulation can encourage translators use self-knowledge, self-monitoring and self-adjustment in the process of translation, which includes translation monitoring, self-evaluation, planning, intention evaluation and self-regulation. 2) Translation meta-cognitive regulation of professional translators is higher than that of student translators, among which the biggest gap is self-regulation, followed by intention evaluation, planning, self-evaluation and translation monitoring. The main reason is that there are some difference in aesthetic attitude, motivations and purpose, translation memory and translation comprehension procession between professional translators and student translators. 3) Trough the Correlation Analysis, it is showed that the correlation between translation meta-cognitive regulation and translation competence of professional translators are higher than that of student translators. To be more specific, the intention evaluation and self-regulation has no correlation with students'translation competence, however; all of the translation meta-cognitive regulation factors have a certain correlation with professional translators'translation competence. In summary, there are some differences in translation meta-cognitive regulation between professional translators and student translators, as well as the high correlation between translation meta-cognitive regulation and translation competence, which has certain significance for translation teaching.