This empirical study is aimed to investigate how translation students in Chinese universities are introduced to, use, and evaluate online resources in Chinese-English translation. One hundred translation students were randomly selected from a leading foreign languages university in China and were asked to complete a questionnaire. It was found that: (1) translation students now rely more on electronic resources than non-electronic ones in their translation practice, the underlying reason being convenience rather than accuracy; and (2) with online resources, translation efficiency is improved. It is hoped that the current study will fill, to some extent, the research gap in the application of online resources in translation practice, and therefore shed some new light on translator training.
The study indicates that before the COVID-19 pandemic, despite its importance, distance interpreter training (DIT) was not positively perceived or widely used in higher education institutions that offer Bachelor of Translation and Interpreting (BTI) and/or Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programs in China. However, the pandemic has changed almost everything in the world, with no exception of DIT, prompting the authors to have a follow-up study in August 2020 of the same 14 full-time interpreting teachers from different BTI and MTI institutions in different parts of China who had been interviewed right before the pandemic. This interview-based comparative study shows that all the interviewees used DIT during the pandemic shutdown and their perceptions of DIT have altered greatly, becoming more objective than subjective and more positive than negative. The pandemic has, to some extent, boosted the further development and acceptance of both the online and blended approaches to interpreter training.
MTI programs in industry-specific universities have drawn little scholarly attention due to their short history and small scale, but they have irreplaceable advantages in training translators for specific industries because of their time-honored and well-established industry-specific disciplines and programs. For this reason, this paper focuses on MTI programs granted in 2014 in 16 industry-specific universities, which cover a variety of industries, including civil aviation, medicine, forestry, agriculture, post and telecommunications, architecture, ocean, petrol, electric power and water resources. All these MTI programs were subjected to the assessments by China National Committee for Translation and Interpreting Education in 2018. By inspecting their assessment data concerning teachers, students, training objectives, programs and characteristic courses, as well as horizontal communications with other disciplines of the respective universities and with language services companies, and by interviewing nine teachers from the universities concerned, the authors discuss the merits and demerits of these MTI programs. The paper concludes by offering some suggestions to translator training in China and beyond.
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