Investigating EFL Learners’ Translation Performance And Achievement Emotions In The Commercial Translation Continuation Task

In the globalized world,translation,as a bridge to link different languages,performs an increasingly important role in business activities.Hence,how to cultivate translation talents and teach commercial translation is a crucial issue for educators and researchers.As the xu-argument is favored in the field of second language acquisition(SLA),the trend towards investigating the effects of the continuation task is increasing.Although the continuation task in literary translation has been researched in the past years,there remains a paucity of research examining the effects of the task on commercial translation and the role of translators’ affective factors in the task.This study aims to address three research questions: 1)What are the effects of commercial translation continuation tasks on EFL learners’ translation performance? 2)How does learners’ translation performance correlate with their achievement emotions in commercial translation continuation tasks? 3)What factors affect learners’ achievement emotions in commercial translation continuation tasks?In order to answer the above questions,an empirical experiment was conducted.A total number of 49 sophomores majoring in business English from two classes participated in this study.The two classes were randomly assigned to the experiment group(EG)and the control group(CG).The students in EG were required to perform the commercial translation continuation task.They were instructed to read the Chinese and English version of a 2018 CSR report,and then to translate a 2019 CSR report from Chinese to English.Participants in CG were required to read the Chinese version of the same 2018 CSR report,and then to translate the same 2019 CSR report from Chinese to English.Before the translation test,an achievement emotion questionnaire was distributed to examine whether students’ emotions had significant difference at the onset of the experiment.After the test,another achievement emotion questionnaire was distributed to get participants’ achievement emotions experienced during and after the test.Four days later,13 participants from the two groups were selected to have further semi-structured interviews.The collecting data were processed through quantitative and qualitative analysis.The quantitative data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney U Test and Spearman correlations.The qualitative data were transcribed by thematic analysis.The results of the study were as follows: 1)Students in EG significantly outperformed students in CG in terms of the quality of vocabulary use,sentence structure,and stylistic features.Alignment of vocabulary,phrase,sentence structure,and translation skills significantly exist in EG’s translated texts;2)Students’ achievement emotions in EG were not statistically related to the overall quality of their translated texts,but significantly associated with alignment effects.Alignment effects were negatively related to positive emotions(except relief)and positively related to negative emotions;3)Some students from EG believed that their emotions were affected by test-level factors(i.e.,task design and test environment),text-level factors(i.e.,level of difficulty and length of text),and learner-level factors(i.e.,familiarity with text,interest in commercial texts,interest in topic,and perceived translation ability).In conclusion,this study confirmed the effects of the continuation task on commercial translation teaching and recognized the role of learners’ emotions in translation activity.The research provides more pertinent implications for translation teaching research as well as pedagogy in business English class.