German Translation Teaching New Concepts—Design and Practice of Translation Courses

Author: Wang Jingping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: The translation course constructs a macro framework, broadening the perspectives of translation instructors. It guides translation teaching from anecdotal experience to systematic and effective instruction under the guidance of scientific theory, creating a training platform for cultivating translation talent. The widespread misconception that "anyone proficient in two languages can translate" has resulted in a lack of specialized training institutions for translation and interpretation in many parts of the world, including China—where the idea of training translators in universities only began to take root recently. However, it is increasingly recognized that working in translation requires not only solid language skills and cultural knowledge (including one's own language and culture) but also specialized translation abilities. These abilities include: correctly understanding the intent of the translation task, effectively analyzing the source text, targetedly searching for information, quickly familiarizing oneself with new fields and professional areas, accurately assessing the expectations of translation clients and readers, selecting appropriate translation methods, knowing how to edit and layout text—just to name a few key points. All these professional skills must be part of training for career translators. This, in turn, requires training institutions to have instructors who have been trained in this field. These instructors must not only possess high proficiency in their native and foreign languages but also extensive hands-on translation experience and a solid theoretical foundation in translation, which they can effectively apply to translation teaching. Ideally, there should be independent courses dedicated to teaching translation methodologies. However, the lack of such courses is not limited to China but is a global issue. In many places, the task of training translation talent in higher education has fallen to teachers with some foreign language teaching experience but no specialized training in translation pedagogy. These teachers rely on self-study to acquire the necessary knowledge for translation teaching, yet even suitable literature is scarce and lacks systematic organization. To address this unsatisfactory situation, I wrote the Handbook of Translation and Interpretation several years ago, which was published in its first edition by Iudicium in Munich in 2000 and its second edition in 2002. It aims to provide guidelines for instructors of translation and interpretation courses and offers numerous suggestions for classroom exercises. The encouraging and positive response to this book proves that the path I have is largely correct: combining the teaching of fundamental translation knowledge and methodologies with selected examples of translation materials to improve teaching quality. As a trained German-Chinese translator and interpreter, and having worked for decades in training German-Chinese translators (first at Humboldt University in Berlin and now at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz/Germersheim), I have always harbored a wish to contribute to improving the training of Chinese translation and interpretation professionals. To this end, I served as the training director for three one-year intensive interpretation workshops in China, selecting participants from among German graduates of Chinese universities. Since my book was published and received recognition and use from Chinese instructors, it naturally occurred to me that there should be a specialized handbook for German-Chinese translation teaching to complement my general teaching manual. Professor Wang Jingping's work here attempts to fulfill that wish.