Exploring English-Major College Students’ Translation Competence Development Through Real-Life Translation Practice: The Case Study of a Translation Club in China
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Wang, Zhe
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Sun, Susan
Crezee, Ineke
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Auckland University of Technology
Abstract
During the past decades, translation competence has been a major topic in the field of translator education (e.g. PACTE Group, 2003; Neubert, 2000; Kiraly, 2000; Kelly, 2005; Göpferich, 2009; European Commission, Directorate-General for Translation, 2022). Although much research has been conducted to investigate the role of formal training programmes in fostering the development of translation competence, relatively little research has been conducted to investigate how learners develop and improve their translation competence in extracurricular real-life settings, especially those that are conducted outside the formal curriculum but retain real-world relevance. With modern pedagogical paradigms focusing ever more on situated, project-based, and learner-centred pedagogies, there is an increasing desire to formally evaluate the pedagogical worth of extracurricular authentic translation practice.
China claims to have established the largest higher education system in the world and, in particular, foreign language learning and translation studies programmes have expanded rapidly in recent years. However, these programmes have been under criticism for failing to equip their graduates with the level of translation competence needed to meet real-life professional demands (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, National Development and Reform Commission, & Ministry of Finance, 2015). To date, research on undergraduate students’ translation competence has focused mainly on examining in-class teaching in the curriculum, largely overlooking the need to help students develop into reflective, resourceful, and competent translation practitioners.
To address this gap, this research investigates a translation club which was set up to offer opportunities for extracurricular real-life translation practice for a group of students at a university in Nanjing, China. Through three independent but thematically linked studies, it provides a detailed picture and understanding of the learning design of the club and how its members react when they work together doing extracurricular real-life translation along with their academic courses. Findings show that participating in the club activities created opportunities for club members’ translation competence development, but at the same time increased coordination demands on temporal structure, roles, feedback, and resources in this learning environment. Club members reported uneven uptake of feedback, inefficient resource consultation and low perceived value of reflective tasks. Translation process and result also indicated a gap between noticing translation problems and achieving high translation quality. In addition, students’ emotions arose from the overlap of voluntary translation tasks, university coursework and interpersonal relationships. Eased or intensified by different boundary strategies students applied, these emotions can impact significantly on their translation learners’ identity development. Based on these findings, this research proposed a redesign plan for this club and offered a substantial and adaptable approach for similar real-life extracurricular translation settings.
This thesis contributes to translator education research by offering an empirically grounded basis for analysing and interpreting extracurricular real-life translation practice, and by showing the importance of integrating multiple data sources of the learning processes, the learning outcomes, and the learners’ experience over time. The thesis also points out that voluntary participation in an extracurricular real-life learning setting can be instrumentally beneficial but emotionally demanding. Therefore, it calls for the integration of pastoral support and wellbeing-sensitive design in similar extracurricular translation settings to create an emotionally supportive learning environment.