Translation Teaching in the 21st Century: Towards a 'Whole-person Education' Approach
-- With special reference to Chinese contexts
Tan Zaixi
Hong Kong Baptist University
Abstract
Over the last few decades, especially since China's opening to the outside world in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the teaching of translation in Chinese universities (including universities in Hong Kong) has been developing with ever increasing momentum. However, as this teaching progresses in the 21st century, we are still faced with some of the fundamental issues that seem to underlie the successful teaching of translation as a tertiary education programme and from the undergraduate through the master's to the doctoral levels. First of all, we need to decide what hidden agenda we have in store for the development of a university programme in translation. We may then need to ask ourselves: What general principles are there that we must follow in teaching translation to university students? How differently should we treat the teaching of translation as a Major/Minor programme and that as a mere subject as part of a foreign language programme? How differently should we manage a translation programme on the undergraduate level, and one on the master's and doctorate levels?
Our answer to these and other questions on translation teaching is to look to it as both training and education. The specific model we propose is a 'Whole-person Translator Education' model, most important of which are its two componential concepts, namely the 'whole-person translator education' concept and the 'translator-development pyramid' concept. Both of these, together with issues on the various kinds of translation competences that are integrated to create a 'whole person' in the translator, are the focus of discussion for this paper. Hopefully light would thus be thrown on the development of a new pedagogical model for the teaching of translation as a university programme, especially that involving the language-pair of Chinese and English.