Research Background and Motivation
In an increasingly globalized world, the need and demand for English proficiency and translation is continuously growing. Pangeanic (2014), an
international translation company, cites research done by Common Sense Advisory, a translation industry think tank, which estimated the size of the translation industry at
$33.5 billion in 2012. According to Pangeanic, the United States represents the largest single market for translation services, while Europe is a close second and Asia is the largest growth area. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014), the U.S. translation industry is expected to grow by 46% from 2012 to 2022, and the most important reason for this growth is globalization.
Because English is in high demand, millions of people around the world study English as a Foreign Language (EFL) knowing that their chances of being accepted to top universities or of landing high-paying jobs may hinge on their English ability.
Unfortunately, although many students worldwide begin their study of English as early as primary school, this does not guarantee mastery, or even proficiency, in the language – especially if English teaching is largely test-oriented, as it is in much of Asia. Thus, a student who tests well may seem to be fluent in English on paper, but may have poor oral and written communication skills in real-life situations. To further exacerbate this problem, upon graduation, students with high levels of English
proficiency are often called upon to translate documents for their employers, as bosses unfamiliar with the field of translation often do not recognize it as a specialized field of study with its own theories and skill sets, and instead may see English translation as an extension of the English language learning itself or perhaps simply a subfield.
The current academic and employment situation in Taiwan reflects the global trends outlined above. According to Wu (2003),
Because of the ever-increasing social and economic growth in Taiwan, the learning of English as a foreign language has become of increasing
importance. Tse’s (1985) survey, for instance, revealed that English is
regarded by Taiwanese society as an essential tool in expanding foreign trade, developing technological skills, and increasing international communication and cultural exchange. In Taiwan, English is the sole required foreign language. (p.14)
The globalization of English puts ever-increasing pressure on Taiwanese students and employees to continually better their English ability. Competition for places at the best universities and positions in coveted international companies is fierce and often it is one’s English ability that ultimately determines success or failure.
However, while the study of English is compulsory in Taiwan and the
education system continues to improve, it nonetheless still leaves much to be desired in terms of quality and results. The first phase of English teaching in Taiwan, from 1949 to 1955, employed the grammar translation method at the senior-high school level. The second phase, from 1955 to 1968, began including English in the junior high curriculum, and practiced an audio-lingual approach. Since 1968, English language textbooks have been standardized across Taiwan. Textbooks can now be subdivided into four main pedagogical categories: listening and speaking, direct method, cognitive approach, and communicative approach (Lee, 2012). Beginning in the second half of 2004, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MOE) made English language learning compulsory for all students, starting in the third grade of elementary school (MOE, 2014).
Although Taiwan’s English language education has improved drastically in the past 60 years, the teaching methodology at most public schools remains rather traditional. The vast majority of teachers simply require students to memorize vocabulary lists and grammar rules for written tests. Wu (2003) states:
In many Asian countries like Taiwan, for instance, the primary goal of teaching high school English in the past few decades has aimed at preparing students to pass university entrance examinations. Thus, the focus for students has been on analyzing English rather than increasing communicative
competence. As a result, English education in these settings tends to promote academic success in formal classrooms (rather than in real life) and most of their EFL learners are instrumentally motivated to learn English. (p.14) The main reason that teachers focus on grammar and testing rather than
communication is almost certainly due to the large class sizes (about 45 students per class) and the facility with which teachers can assign definite right or wrong marks to vocabulary and grammar exercises and exams. Fortunately, there does seem to be a trend toward emphasizing communication ability (especially oral), but due to class size and time constraints, only so much progress can be expected.
In my own experience, the area least addressed in public classrooms in Taiwan is English writing. This is no doubt owing to the reasons mentioned above, in addition to the difficulty of correcting student essays and time constraints. It is also likely due to the fact that many Taiwanese English teachers themselves, not being native English speakers, are not familiar enough with English writing style to teach it. This is
unfortunate, as a high-level of English writing ability lends itself to better English translations. As Peter Newmark (1988) explains:
The idea that translators, particularly of non-literary texts, have to write well is far from generally accepted—many believe that where facts are concerned, style takes second place. But the truth is, it is the style that ensures that the facts are effectively presented…Whilst mistakes of truth and language are graver than mistakes of usage, it is skilled usage that ensures successful transmission. (p.190)
When Taiwanese students do write in English, they often approach writing as a translation task, attempting to translate their ideas from Chinese into English—often word-by-word. Wu (2003) agrees, asserting:
…according to my teaching experience of these business student writers at a junior college, they often translate directly from Chinese into English, that is, they tend to write in a Chinese way. Their difficulty in English writing is not simply a syntactic problem, but rather it seems more like a problem resulting from different rhetorical styles between their L1 (Chinese) and FL (English).
(p.23)
Moreover, Wu (2003) found that 68% of the participants in her study considered translating from Chinese to English to be a moderately effective writing strategy and that when writing in English, students tended to directly translate their Chinese ideas into English, thereby requiring them to rely heavily on dictionaries when performing translations. This suggests then that, at least in Taiwan, student composition errors and translation errors will share some similarities.
However, in order to translate well, one must be able to write well in the target language. Since the writing of English essays or reports is largely neglected in the classroom, even at the university level, most adult students write very poorly in English. Many do not even have a basic understanding of the organization of texts in
English, which makes writing, and by extension, translation, summarily difficult.
Furthermore, most Taiwanese students’ only experience with ‘translation,’ if it may be called such, is translating single Chinese sentences into English for the purposes of compulsory education homework and exams. Because translating sentences
eliminates the need to understand writing organization and transitional phrases, most Taiwanese students and teachers approach translation as a simple vocabulary and grammar activity, failing to realize the linguistic demands that real translation requires.
Nevertheless, high school and college students are expected to perform translations for standardized exams in Taiwan. The General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT, 大學學科能力測驗), Taiwan’s national college entrance exam, was taken by 145,575 students in 2014 and tested five categories: Chinese, English, math, social sciences and natural sciences (“Item Analysis,” 2014). Thus, English accounts for a full one-fifth of the total score. Of this, an English composition is 20% of the English score, while translation is 8%. However, if as mentioned above, most students
approach writing as a translation task, translation becomes a still more significant deciding factor in student scores.
Even if the composition is not factored in, the translation section of GSAT causes serious problems for students and can negatively impact their chances of being accepted to the university of their choice. There are only two sentences in the section.
These are worth 4% each, for a total of 8%. The instructions ask students to translate the Chinese text into “correct, fluent, and expressive English” (“正確、通順、達意
的英文”) (“Item Analysis,” 2014). Although these categories are somewhat
each error. Thus, there is no scoring scale differentiating stylistic and language errors, possibly because all errors are assumed to be related to language and punctuation.
The following two Chinese sentences appeared on the 2014 GSAT. The English translations are those suggested by the GSAT, of which there are numerous versions:
1. 有些年輕人辭掉都市裡的高薪工作，返回家鄉種植有機蔬菜。
1. Some young people in the city have quit their high-paying jobs and returned to their hometowns to grow organic vegetables.
2. 藉由決心與努力，很多人成功了，不但獲利更多，還過著更健康的生
活。
2. Through their determination and hard work, many of them have succeeded.
They have not only made more profits, but also lived a healthier life. (“Item Analysis,” 2014)
Of a possible 8%, the average score for the translation section of the GSAT was 3.73% in 2014, 3.43% in 2013, and 2.81% in 2012. Of the 145,575 students who took the exam in 2014, only 1.4% scored an 8/8 on the translation section, while a total of 11.0% scored a 0/8 (“Item Analysis,” 2014). Because high school students are being tested on translation, and the results of the college entrance exams have serious ramifications for students’ futures, both students and teachers would benefit from knowing the types of errors common to non-specialized Chinese-to-English translations.
Translation plays an even larger role in the intermediate and advanced-intermediate levels of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT), which is administered by The Language Training & Testing Center (LTTC). This test is
required when applying to numerous universities, and a large number of companies employ it to partially determine job candidates’ English proficiency during the hiring process, or they require their employees to pass it in order to obtain promotions and raises (Elite English, 2015). Roughly 300,000 people take the GEPT each year, yet the vast majority of them have no formal translation experience. However, for the intermediate and high-intermediate levels of the GEPT, translating a paragraph accounts for 40% of the total writing score (writing a composition accounts for the other 60%). In order to receive the full 40% for the Chinese-to-English translation section, participants must completely express the content of the original Chinese text in English, the English text must have very good structure and coherence, and diction, grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization must be almost all correct (“內容能 充分表達題意，文段(text)結構及連貫性甚佳；用字遣詞、文法、拼字、標點及
大小寫幾乎無誤。”) (LTTC, 2015). This is no doubt a very tall order for students
who have no translation experience and who have been trained from an early age to approach translation as vocabulary and grammar exercises.
The pass rates for the GEPT translation sections have not been made public.
However, the pass rates for the second stage of the GEPT intermediate and high- intermediate, which includes, speaking, translation, and writing, have. In 2013, approximately 310,000 people took the GEPT. Of these, 190,000 were eligible to sit for the second stage of the test (writing and speaking). The intermediate level accounted for 34% of these test takers, the pass rate (second stage) was 31%, the average age of test taker was 17.8 years, and 72% held a middle or high school diploma. The high-intermediate level comprised 7% of test takers, the pass rate
high school diploma, while 36% had graduated from university (GEPT Statistical Report). The total number of test takers for the 2014 GEPT has not been released, but the percentages and averages have. They are nearly identical to those of 2013, with the exception that the average age of test taker has fallen slightly from 17.8 years to 17.6 years for the intermediate level and from 21.0 years to 20.6 years for the high-intermediate level. The pass rates also rose slightly in 2014, from 31% to 32% for the intermediate level and from 26% to 31% for the high-intermediate level (GEPT Statistical Report).
While the GSAT and the GEPT are the most commonly-taken tests with translation components, a smaller percentage of Taiwanese sat for the Chinese and English Translation and Interpretation Competency Examinations (中英文翻譯能力 檢定考試), which were held annually by Taiwan’s MOE from 2007 to 2011. The pass
rate for the first stage of the Chinese-to-English written exam was 2.09% and 12.23%
for 2009 and 2011, respectively (data for the remaining years is unavailable) (MOE).
In 2010, the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC) was commissioned by the MOE to begin preparations to administer the Chinese and English Translation and Interpretation Competency Examinations. The exam was cancelled in 2012, and the LTTC began administering the exam in 2013 (MOE, 2012). The pass rate for the Chinese-to-English translation section of the 2013 exam was a mere 2.38% (Focus Taiwan, 2014). In 2014, the test had a total of 518 test takers. Of these, 49 passed the English-to-Chinese translation test, and 12 passed the Chinese-to-English portion (LTTC, 2015). Evidently translation tests, even for skilled professionals, are no easy task. How then can we ask high school and college students to go blindly into exams with translation components?
Clearly, professional translation necessitates native or near-native competence in both the source and target languages, in addition to requiring superior written communication skills in the target language and a profound understanding of both source and target language cultures. Translation is a daunting task and should be approached with a degree of both respect and awe. Regrettably, most schools and employers fail to realize the true demands of translation and assume that a person who tests well in English can similarly translate well into English.
Therefore, when Taiwanese students enter university or the workforce, it should come as no surprise that they are ill-equipped to perform Chinese-to-English translation, regardless of the number of years they have spent learning English or how high they score on standardized English tests. Since Chinese-to-English translation (and by proxy, English writing) plays such a crucial role in Taiwan’s standardized testing, and since the stakes for these tests are so high, it is critical that teachers know what types of problems students are likely to encounter when translating and what the most common types of errors are. In this way, teachers can help students focus on high-frequency errors, while sidelining less problematic ones. Until the current study, however, there has been little research categorizing the types of errors
non-professional translators are likely to commit when performing Chinese-to-English translations.
Research Purposes and Research Questions
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to utilize two previous MOE Mandarin Chinese-to-English translation exams in conjunction with an error typology developed by the researcher in an attempt to categorize both stylistic and linguistic errors
committed by a group of 30 advanced adult Taiwanese English learners during a
three-month semi-longitudinal study. It is hoped that by pinpointing problem areas in the translations, the study findings can both provide self-study recommendations as to how Taiwanese students and test-takers can improve their English translations and also offer preliminary recommendations to English teachers on how Taiwanese translation pedagogy can be improved.
Toward the ultimate goal of contributing in some small way to research in the field of translation pedagogy in Taiwan, the main research questions to be addressed are as follows: (1) How to develop an error typology for Chinese-to-English
translation that will accurately detect and sufficiently describe student translation errors? (2) What are the main types of errors most commonly made by students and what is the frequency of these errors? (3) Do translation scores largely improve with practice and feedback from the first translation to the second? (4) What are some commonalities among general translation techniques utilized by the highest and lowest performing students?