A Study On The Test Difficulty Discrepancy Of CET-6 Parallel Translation Tasks

CET-4 and CET-6,having gone through more than 30 years and reformed many times,made great contributions to the cultivation of English talents.Since December 2013,CET-4and CET-6 have been reformed again and parallel translation was adopted in CET-6translation tests.On the basis of previous studies on parallel texts,this paper adopts an empirical approach to explore the following questions: 1)Are there any difficulty discrepancies in CET-6 parallel translation test? 2)What is the relationship among topic familiarity,vocabulary self-assessment,sentence structure and translation quality? 3)How to help candidates avoid common losing points in C-E translation?Firstly,in order to explore whether these parallel translations are within the scope of the translation syllabus,the author conducts a study of all CET-6 translation paragraphs since the reform in December 2013.In addition,all the parallel translation texts appearing in CET-6 from June 2016 to June 2018 are selected as the questionnaire material.Through a questionnaire survey of 96 sophomores and juniors in a university in Tianjin,research results reviews that the two parallel texts in CET-6 translation test in December 2016 are quite different in terms of topic familiarity,number of rare words and difficulty in translation.Based on the questionnaire and the two paragraphs,the author conducts an empirical study on 32 sophomores majoring in exhibition planning and management in another university in Tianjin.According to the students’ scores and translations,the author analyzes the difficulty discrepancies of the two parallel translations,the relationship among topic familiarity,vocabulary self-assessment,obscure words and the quality of the translated texts,as well as the points that the examinees lose in CET-6 translation examinations.After analyzing the test and survey results,the following findings were found: 1)Combining CET-6 translation examination outline,most of these parallel translation paragraphs are within the scope of the translation test syllabus in terms of themes and word counts.2)Topic familiarity and vocabulary self-assessment of these candidates have little effects on the quality of translation.3)The number of rare words and adjustment insentence structure affect the coherence and quality of translation to some extent.4)Candidates lose more points in the translation of numbers and adjustment in words order.First of all,the proposer should ensure that the CET-6 parallel translations are within the scope of the syllabus,so that candidates can prepare according to the syllabus.And then,in order to ensure the fairness of the examination,parallel translations should be equally difficult.Finally,candidates should consolidate the foundation of English learning,especially translation in numbers and adjustment in sentence structure.