An Empirical Research On The Influence Of Translation Unit On Translation Quality

Translation unit,an important concept in translation studies,has attracted close attention of researches.From the prescriptive viewpoint of translation studies,translation unit can guide translation activity.The descriptive translation studies hold the strong belief that translation unit can reflect to some extent the key psychological and cognitive status of translators in translation process.Therefore,translation unit,either in theoretical or practical ways,is of vital importance in translation studies.By adopting Think-aloud Protocols with questionnaires and translation analysis,this thesis explores the inner thinking process in English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation process of 12 translation majors.This thesis is designed to answer the following three questions:RQ1.Whether the experiment subjects have the awareness of translation unit?RQ2.What is the difference between high-proficiency subjects and low-proficiency subjects in terms of translation unit?RQ3.What is the relationship between translation unit and translation quality in translation process?It is found that all the experiment subjects have the awareness of translation unit in translation process.The high-proficiency group operates on a larger translation unit than the low-proficiency group.In translation process,the high-proficiency group and low-proficiency group take sentence level and clause level as subjective translation unit,while the high-proficiency group takes sentence level and clause level as objective translation unit and the low-proficiency choose word level and clause level as objective translation unit.This thesis further explores the relationship between translation unit and translation quality.It is found that translation unit of low level such as word level and phrase level easily leads to word-for-word translation or even mistranslation.Translation unit of medium level such as clause level enables translators to grasp meaning on a relatively micro-level.The division of sentence level into clauses enables translators to have a better understanding of the context,especially in long complicated sentences.The operation of translation on high level enables translators to leap out the bound of source text and translate right in meaning.Meanwhile,the handle of specific clauses,sentences or even words and phrases against the sentence or above-sentence unit is beneficial for translators to deal with specific problems in translation process.This thesis discusses the relationship between translation unit and translation quality by comparing and analyzing the differences in translation unit of high-proficiency and low-proficiency group,thus offering empirical supports to translation studies and shedding light on translation teaching and translation training.