On The Reflective Teaching In Translation Teaching For English Majors

Since the early1980s, reflective teaching has been greatly popular with global teachers and educators. Meanwhile, the increasingly booming economy and international exchange in China requires more and more qualified translators and interpreters, thus translation teaching especially for English majors which shoulders the task of training high-qualified translation personnel for the society has been attached more and more importance. This paper will combine the theory of reflective teaching with translation teaching to describe and analyze the contents, approaches and process of teachers’ reflection for the purpose of improving the quality of the translation teaching.The methods adopted in this paper include literature study, interview and questionnaire. The present study mainly focuses on following questions:1) In what aspects do translation teachers reflect in translation teaching?2) What reflective means do they use in translation teaching?3) How do they carry out reflective teaching?The present study was conducted among50teachers and280students from8universities in Nanchang, Jiangxi province. The results of the research are as follows:(1) Translation teachers usually focus on reflection about teaching objectives, teaching subjects and teaching materials. However, they reflect less upon course design and they seldom combine various testing forms to evaluate classroom teaching in an all-around way.(2) As for reflective means, a majority of translation teachers make self-reflection, some make reflection by communicating with colleagues or students, and some others even reflect with the aid of networks. However, most teachers surveyed reflect in an oral way instead of written approaches, which may easily make their reflection less scientific, less rational and even less systematic.(3) Most teachers not only emphasize translation theory and translation techniques but also stress on introducing linguistic comparison and cultural differences to students in due time. Unfortunately, they seldom illustrate the differences in a systematic way. Besides, they make endeavor to encourage students to participate in group discussion or translation appreciation, yet they seldom introduce translation workshop to classroom teaching. Moreover, most of them employ examples or exercises in different fields in translation teaching. However, it’s not an easy task to cover every field within limited class hours because of the large scale of fields.Taking all the above-mentioned factors into consideration, some pedagogical implications and suggestions are offered:(1) Translation teachers should be students-oriented and often communicate with students in various ways to know about their feedback or need in time. Besides, they should write teaching journals, reflective files, blogs or design questionnaires in a persevering way.(2) A cooperative platform and a positive teaching atmosphere should be provided to translation teachers by periodically offering some learning opportunities for them to get trained such as expert reports, teaching seminar, academic exchanges or in-service education. Meanwhile, syllabus or course settings should be properly revised and extra class hours should be increased in translation course.