An Empirical Study Of BTI Students' Self-assessment In E-C Translation

With the educational progress, translation has become more and more important in English teaching field. However, as an important part of translation competence, self-assessment competence still hasn't caught enough attention from the researchers, remaining as a largely unexplored research field. In order to develop translation pedagogy and meet the demand for training future translators, it's imperative to incorporate self-assessment into the translation teaching and to study its effects on students' translation process. Using E-C translation course as the research platform and selecting a total of thirty second-year and third-year BTI students within the Foreign Language School at Huazhong University of Science and Technology as the research subjects, the author tries to answer the following questions:(1) Is there positive correlation between students' self-grading of their translation tasks and lecturer-grading?(2) Is there positive correlation between lecturer-grading and lecturer's assessment of students' self-evaluative comments?(3) Is there positive correlation between the students' self-grading and lecturer's assessment of students' self-evaluative comments?(4)Is there agreement between the student's grading tendency and lecturer's assessment of students' self-evaluative comments?(5) How do students perceive the effectiveness of the assessment measure in a translation task?(6) What are the possible reasons for the difference/ agreement between students' self-grading and lecturer-grading?In the empirical study, a frequency table is firstly employed to find out the agreement between students' self-grading and the lecturer-grading. Then SPSS 19.0 is used for subsequent quantitative research. After that, an analysis is given to the four evaluation questions of the questionnaire to indicate students' perceptions of self-assessment. Last but not least, interviews are carried out to identify explanations for differences/agreement between the lecturer-grading and the students' self-grading and to further explore the effectiveness of assessment measure.The findings show that(1) There lies positive correlation between students' self-grading and lecturer-grading; the better a student's self-assessment competence is, the better his or her translation performance is; students who have better translation performance and achieve higher grades in self-evaluative comments are more likely to underrate themselves, which is probably related to their self-critical tendency.(2) Students show general support for having a rubric when doing translation and a slightly weaker but still very positive support for having this particular rubric for the assignment. Most of the students find the rubric greatly help them reflect on their work, and a great number of them revise their translation through this self-reflection.In the end, based on the findings and limitations, implications and suggestions are given for improving self-assessment process in translator education at undergraduate level.