Study On Master Of Translation And Interpreting Students’ Advisors’ Competence

With the departing of translation discipline from the foreign language discipline, the establishment of the translation major and MTI degree and the higher market demand for translation talents, the training of excellent MTI students is becoming a must and new challenge of higher education. Moreover, MTI advisors’ development is one of the important factors that influence education activities, therefore, it is necessary to redefine the competence that MTI students’ advisors should possess which will promote the construction and development of the translation discipline, enrich the content of translation education research, and be conducive to forming a reasonable translation talents cultivation system and keeping the pace of college translation talents’ training with that of the translation market ultimately.Through combing both domestic and foreign literature about the development of translation teachers’ ability, the study has already achieved a clear summary on the present developing situation and existing problems of translation teachers. There exist so many differences between MTI students’ advisors and professional English teachers, such as the difference of entry qualification, teaching objects and academic research experiences, however, existing researches focused primarily on comprehensive ability of foreign language teachers instead of making a clear distinction between advisors and English teachers. Moreover, as for MTI students’ advisors, there is not a comprehensive and reasonable evaluation system and standard. Given the importance of MTI students’ advisors in the process of training of high-level, applied and professional translators and interpreters, it is a must to promote advisors’ translation competence.Considering the study’s purpose of promoting MTI students’ advisors competence, the study proposed three questions. The first one is “What components are included in the competence model of MTI students’ advisors”. The second is “How does the study confirm the competence model of MTI students’ advisors by using the Structural Equation Modeling”. The third one is “How can MTI students’ advisor’s competence be improved”. Based on the competence theory, the study firstly extracted key competence words through literature analysis; secondly, it conducted the interviewing of 28 MTI students’ advisors, transformed and coded the 26 interview texts, and revised the questionnaire. After the reliability and validity of the revised questionnaire were verified, 410 questionnaires were distributed, including 298 valid questionnaires. Then, the study used SPSS16.0 to conduct an exploratory factor analysis for 50% of the data and used Lisrel 8.70 to carry out a confirmatory factor analysis for the remaining data. The results showed that the all indexes of structural equation model are within the reasonable range, and the model fitting is good. The competence model contains two levels. The first level includes five dimensions, and they are teaching level, translation practice ability, scientific research ability, student-oriented and personal traits; the second layer contains 29 competence words, including course knowledge, teaching strategies, translation experience, discipline frontier consciousness, academic guidance, caring for students, sense of responsibility and so on. In addition to that, the study proposed several competence promotion strategies by combining with the five factors of competency model, and it also put forward some principles and advice that universities should follow which will contributes to the promotion of advisors’ competence.The competence model set up in this study has high practical value for universities’ and colleges’ management of advisors and translation education. Management departments can apply it to the hiring and performance evaluation of advisors. As for advisors themselves, the model can help them with knowing their teaching shortcomings and improving competence.