A Study Of Intercultural Communicative Competence Cultivation In Translation Teaching For English Majors

As a bridge of intercultural communication, translation plays an important role inthe transmission of information between different cultures. Therefore, the concept ofintercultural communicative competence in translation teaching has gained more andmore attention from many scholars. It is well accepted that language is closely relatedto culture and is an important channel for the spreading of cultural information.Unavoidably, when translating one language into another, we will come across a lot ofwords and sentences with rich cultural connotation. Therefore, translation involvesculture as well as language.It is believed that translation can comprehensively reflect the students’languageproficiency more than other language practice. Translation here refers to thetransference between native language and target language within an activity ofintercultural communication rather than its advanced competence of translation theory.It is a proper transference from the native language to the target language, whichrequires the language students to use their listening, speaking, reading and writingskills and comprehend the target culture thoroughly. However, college students’language proficiency is far from satisfactory. The author carries out a case study ontranslation exercise from three universities in Shandong. The subjects are thesophomore English majors. After two years’college English study, the students areexpected to have a solid English foundation. However, a number of errors arecommitted in the students’translation assignments. The analysis result reveals theabsence of students’intercultural communicative competence and their scarcity ofculture knowledge. Most of the students tend to blend their Chinese ways of thinkingand expressions into English patterns, which leads to some typical pragmatic failures.Intercultural communicative competence influences the students’languageproficiency and challenges translation teaching. The aim of this thesis is to investigatethe current situation of sophomore English majors’intercultural communicativecompetence in translation and the teachers’awareness of cultivating intercultural communicative competence in translation teaching. Altogether 85 sophomore Englishmajors and 15 translation teachers who have more than three years of teachingexperience were randomly selected as subjects of this investigation. They were fromthree different universities in Shandong province (Shandong University, University ofJINAN, and QILU Normal University). Based on the translating test andquestionnaires, which were administrated to collect data to test and investigate thestudents’cultural knowledge, intercultural awareness and intercultural communicativecompetence through translation teaching. The author offers some implications andsuggestions on how to enlarge students’cultural knowledge and reinforce thecultivation of intercultural communicative competence in translation teaching. Theanalysis of the translating test and questionnaires indicated that: 1) The students mademany mistakes in the translation passage and translating test mainly because of theirscarce of intercultural awareness and cultural knowledge. 2) The students haven’t paidenough attention to their intercultural communicative competence in translation. 3)The teachers haven’t paid enough attention to cultivating students’interculturalcommunicative competence in translation teaching.The author offers some tentative suggestions as to how to better incorporateculture studies into translation teaching and to help the students to reinforce theawareness of cultivating intercultural communicative competence and broaden theircultural knowledge. Thus we have to pay more attention to teaching culturalknowledge and cultivating students’intercultural communicative competence intranslation class, since rich cultural knowledge and intercultural communicativecompetence are the basic foundation for doing translation well, thus to develop theirtranslation competence in essence.