A Survey Report On Topic Selection Of MTI Theses

There have been 249 universities and colleges authorized to offer MTI programs since 2007.Along with the rapid development of MTI education,studies on MTI degree theses are in need of enrichment,as revealed by researchers.This report intends to answer the following research questions to understand the current situation of MTI theses: 1)In terms of topic selection,what features do MTI theses present? 2)What problems are there in the topic selection of the MTI theses? 3)What measures can be taken to further improve the topic selection of MTI theses?The MTI theses of a MTI program in a university in central China are chosen for this study.All in all,339 MTI theses are collected,categorized and analyzed from the perspectives of thesis form,theoretical framework and research focus.It is concluded as follows:1.Features in the thesis form: The most popular writing model is Translation Practice Report(TPR,71.9%),followed by Research Paper(RP,19.8%)and Translation Experiment Report(TER,7.7%).The rest 0.6% are shared by Translation Internship Report(TIR)and Translation Survey Report(TSR).In respect of yearly change,TPR is the only one presenting a generally rising trend while RP showed a downturn since 2014 and disappeared in 2017 and 2018.TER,however,only appeared in the middle years of the period in interpreting classes,without forming a tendency.2.Features in theoretical framework: Most students are aware of the application of theories,and the theses that employed specific theories account for 61.5% of the whole,demonstrating a feature of variety.Interestingly,only a few theories appeared both in translation and interpreting classes.TPRs of the two majors applied 39 different theories,with 8 in common;RPs employed 23 and shared 3.Skopos theory is the only one that enjoys the same position of highest occurrence in the two majors.3.Features in research focuses: 1)TERs are all done by interpreting students and focused on student interpreters' abilities and quality that may influence their interpreting performance.2)Like TERs,RPs from interpreting classes care much about the imperfections in and improvements on interpreter's subjective aspects.3)RPs by translation students focus on objective textual or linguistic analyses and strategic suggestions to better the output of translation activities.4)In TPRs,both majors prefer objective expositions and theses from translation classes are increasingly presenting pointed and micro-level analyses.5)In respect of text genre,theses from interpreting classes rely more on non-literary texts due to the particularity of interpreting activities while those from translation classes includes literary text(LT,40.6%),non-literary text(NLT,56.6%)and academic text(AT,2.7%),of which the former two are becoming more and more balanced.4.Problems revealed: 1)Despite of the standardization of thesis form,there is an imbalance in distribution of writing models,exemplified by the overemphasizing of TPR.In addition,students are displaying a conservative choice of writing model.2)There is still room for improvement in students' theoretical analysis for some of them failed to specify how the theories were applied in their translation practices.3)In terms of research focuses,translation students did not pay enough attention to TERs and their personal abilities or aspects that will also affect translating performance.Furthermore,the main topics of TPRs from the two majors sometimes overlap with each other.More importantly,the problems are not found particular to XXX University but common in many other MTI institutions.5.Countermeasures for improvement: Encouragement of diversity in forms,providing training courses and creating more internship opportunities;development of study interests and mastering methods in writing and analysis for students.