RQ2: What would the MTI students and expert translators suggest for the current situation of MTI teaching in such aspect as curriculum provision, teaching methods?
RQ3: What improvement could both the MTI students and the translation teaching system make?
1.3 Structure of the Study
The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. Following the introduction of chapter one, chapter two is a review of the previous studies. Chapter three presents the quantitative and qualitative research in the form of questionnaires and interviews. Chapter four deals with data collected and then gives out the major findings. Eventually, chapter five will expose the conclusion. At the end, the references and appendix are appended.文献综述
2. Literature Review
2.1 Studies on Translation Process
Over the last two decades, studies on translation process have made great progress, revealing translators’ cognitive process of complementing the translation task. The main focus of earlier studies were in general translation process and strategies.And with more and more attention drawn to this field, many other factors have been taken into consideration, such as translation unit, translators’ identity, the role of the mother tongue, and even the dictionary use.
The differences between expert and novice translators were first explored for the pedagogical purpose. Besides, the problem-solving and decision-making process, features of strategic behaviors were at the time among the focus of studies.
All the endeavors made by previous researchers have demonstrated that studies on translation process are no longer for one single purpose, or involve a few unilateral factors. Nowadays, an overall perspective is of increasingly greater significance to exploring translators’ operational progress.
2.2 Studies on Translation Strategies
Krings(1986: 263-275) conducted a TAP experiment in which he asked eight German learners of English as second language to produce an oral translation of a written text.According to Krings, translation strategies can be categorized into “strategies of problem indicators, comprehension, equivalent retrieval, equivalent monitoring, decision-making and reduction”.
In Gerloff’s(1986: 243-62) TAP studies, she put forward a more complex classification of translation strategies: “problem identification, text inference and reasoning, linguistic analysis, text conceptualization, storage and retrieval, task monitoring, and general search and selection”.
In another study by Seguinot(1996: 75-95) who assigned two professional translators to work together at the same task, translation strategies are classified into four types as typical “professional” translation strategies: “interpersonal strategies(brainstorming, correction, phatic function), search strategies(dictionaries, world knowledge, words), monitoring strategies(reread ST and TT, consult, compare units), inferencing strategies(consult)”.
All in all,previous TAPs studies about translation strategies have been conducted for the classification of translation strategies.A great quantity of recognition experiments have been developed from various perspectives and for different purposes.Though with no unanimous conclusions,these endeavors are fruitful and have laid foundations for more studies in the area.
2.3 Comparisons between MTI Students and Expert Translators
As more and more researchers realized the advantages and necessity of involving professional translators into studies, an increasing number of studies started including behaviors of translation experts, the majority of which comprised expert-novice comparisons.