The Application Of The Interpretive Theory To College English Translation Teaching

The translation market is booming in the Information Age, which also gives morechallenge on translation teaching. So how to cultivate qualified translators that are suitable forthe translation market has been an important research of translation teaching. However, nowconventional college English translation teaching extremely stressed translation knowledge;sometimes teachers explained the text in a traditional and casual way, under which it wasn’ttranslation competence other than translation knowledge that was emphasized; translation wasonly used to compare similarities or difference between two languages. These ways are notgood for students’translation interest, which also lead to disadvantage to students’translationcompetence.The Interpretive Theory, put forward according to Danica Seleskovite’s fruitful translationpractice, constantly strive to research how to combine systematic translation theory withteaching practice. The theory made translation process as a pointcut and tried to apply its mainconcepts of translation unit, translation sense, especially the triangle model into translationteaching class in Ecole Superieure d’Interpretes et de Traducteurs/ESIT. Many qualifiedinternational translators and interpreters ranging 20 kinds of languages have been fostered. Thisthesis puts forward the feasibility of applying the Interpretive Theory to college Englishtranslation teaching, and tests its positive effect on improving college students’translationcompetence and interest and on improving translation teaching. The research questions cover: 1)Can principles and methods of the Interpretive Theory enhance students’translation initiativeand interest? 2) Can systematic guidance of the interpretive theory advance college students’translation competence? 3) Can translation process model have positive influence on students’attitude toward translation process? 4) Compared with traditional approach, can the InterpretiveTheory guide translation teaching effectively?Directed by these research questions, the author selected two proximate-level naturalclasses as the subjects of this experiment which lasted 16 weeks, one as the comparison group,and the other as the experiment group through pre-test among all the sophomores of Law School in Shandong Polytechnic University. The Interpretive Theory was adopted in theexperiment group, while the traditional translation skill approach, like addition, negation,inversion was applied in the comparison group. After the experiment, the author carried outpost-test, questionnaire and interview, of all which results were analyzed quantitatively andqualitatively with SPSS13.0.The findings of teaching experiments were: 1) principles of the Interpretive Theory, whichaims at information exchange rather than passing on knowledge contributed a lot to students’translation interest and to their initiative to translation practice after class. 2) Results of thepost-test told the interpretive theory can help enhance learners’translation competence. 3) Thetraining process of Interpretive Theory changed students’translation model of word for word orsentence for sentence, which equally deepened their value that language by nature is forinformation exchange. 4) Results of questionnaire, interview showed that college Englishstudents desire to professional guidance of translation theory, and the students’enhancement ofpost-test scores proved that systematic guidance of the Interpretive Theory can be applied intocollege English teaching.In spite of the positive results, the study has its limitations; some suggestions for futureresearch were brought up in the end.