从“八级口语与口译考试”看英语专业学生的口译能力培养

Investigating the interpreting competence of college English Majors in China:An analysis of TEM8-Oral

本文分析了73633名英语专业四年级学生在2004至2012年度"八级口语与口译考试"中的口译成绩及其中两个年度(2007,2010)共369名考生的口译语料,以考察英语专业学生的口译能力。分析显示:1)总体而言,考生的口译能力(特别是英译汉能力)不够令人满意,约三分之一考生的口译水平未达到英语专业教学大纲的要求。2)具体来说,考生在英译汉任务中的问题主要表现在词语理解、要点捕捉及数字传达上;在汉译英任务中,考生的问题包括套话不熟悉、热点词缺乏、语句混乱及用词不当。基于以上结果,笔者对进一步加强英语专业口译教学提出了相关建议。

This study investigated the oral interpreting competence of fourth-year English majors in China by analy- zing overall performance of 73633 participants in both English-Chinese （E-C） and Chinese-English （C-E） interpre- ting tasks in TEMS-Oral （Test for English Majors Band-8, Oral Test） from 2004 through 2012. In-depth error analy- sis was also made of 369 student interpreters＇ transcripts to reveal their problems in doing E-C and C-E interpreting. The students＇ overall performance, particularly in E-C interpreting, was found not very satisfactory; around one third of the students failed to reach the standard set by the national teaching syllabus for English majors. The students, in the E-C task, had great difficulty in understanding the source language when it contained unfamiliar words, complex sentences as well as numerals ; in the C-E task, they showed such problems as lack of popular sentence patterns and socio-political terms, poor syntax and diction. Based on these findings, suggestions are put forward on how to improve the teaching of oral interpreting for college English majors in China.