An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Cognitive Factors And Encyclopedic Knowledge On Translation Competence

Translation, as a language communication bridge between various peoples, plays asignificant role in cross-cultural communication. Top professional translators have beengreatly needed in recent years. Therefore, how to improve translators’ translationcompetence has become a topic with high research value.Research about translation competence experienced single factor stage confined tolanguage competence and increasingly rich and comprehensive multi-factor stage.Although many scholars have opened up horizons and broadened their thoughts in thestudy of translation competence, there are still many limitations. Based on this point, thisempirical study attempts to explore the effects of cognitive factors (working memory, rapidnaming, and logical reasoning) and encyclopedic knowledge on translation competence byreferring to translation competence composing mode designed by PACTE study group andusing SPSS (17.0) data analysis software for descriptive, correlation and regressionanalysis of collected data. The subjects in the study are51students of Beijing InternationalStudies University, majoring in MTI (English). The final results of the study indicate that:Under the condition of controlling age factorFirst, there exists positive correlation between cognitive factors and translationcompetence, and it can predict translation competence in a proportion of18%.Second, among the cognitive factors, logical reasoning is the most effective predictorfor translation competence (correlation coefficient is0.438) and it is found to beresponsible for17%of the translation competence; There is no significant correlationbetween working memory and translation competence，and between rapid naming andtranslation competence.Third, no significant correlation is found between encyclopedic knowledge andtranslation competence (correlation coefficient is0.143), and it can only account for1.8%of the translation competence.In view of the above results, in order to explore different effects of these factors onboth translation and interpretation, this paper analyzes effects of these factors oninterpretation as well, so as to make a horizontal and vertical comparison betweeninterpretation and translation, thus making the experimental data more convincing.This empirical study supported by objective data has verified previous scholars’theoretical opinions, and is more extensive in terms of research scope. In addition, theauthor hopes that the research perspective combining translation studies and cognitivepsychology could bring some enlightenment to subsequent translation competence study, broadening and enriching the research vision of translation competence, and also hopesthat, to some extent, it could shed light on translation teaching.