Pedagogical Approaches
As the Chinese Translation course is relatively young in the Chinese Studies Program in Monash，there has long been a shortage of qualified teaching staff.Although different forms of translation exercise are seen in different stages of Chinese language teaching，yet when it comes to teaching translation as an independent disciplinary study，it is even harder to find teachers who possess the knowledge of syntactical analysis of both languages and the writing of translation appraisal.As the undergraduate course grows，more qualified teachers have joined our rank and we have formulated the following pedagogical approaches:
(1)To enhance individual language proficiency，we added respective(English and Chinese)monolingual exercise，such as recitation，shortessay writing，newspaper reading，etc.
(2)Paraphrasing exercises are introduced to improve comprehension of source texts and acccuracy in the formulation of target texts;
(3)We changed the traditional“workshop”type of class teaching to translation appraisal and class group work.This gives students chance to see the nature and diversity in translation.
Fig.14.5 below shows the actual effects in teaching:
Fig.14.5 Survey results 1:Why did you choose this translation unit?
Prior to learning translation，over 75 percent of students expressed wishes to improve translation skills，and there is an equal number of students wanting to improve their English and Chinese language skills.On the premise of clear students’learning objectives，curriculum designers need to take into consideration both students’aspirations and the teaching objectives.It is clear that students were expecting traditional approaches in learning translation before they commenced their study with us.But at the end of their studies，the following survey results are indicative of the effect in adjusting focus of training(see fig.14.6).
Fig.14.6 Survery results 2:After studying this unit for one semester，I find I have improved
After their study，students reported high improvement in translation skills(83.3%)，following it is their improvements in Chinese writing skills(37.9%)，English writing ranks third(33.3%).It is worth noting that“understanding Australian society and culture”takes up the fourth position(30.3%)which is a positive result from the localization of teaching materials.