Title: A Trilogy of Optimization Pedagogy for Developing Translation Competence

Abstract: The core purpose of translation teaching is to develop students’ translation competence. Translation teaching can be centered on practicing multiple translation of sentences with proper concern for textual cohesion and coherence, and a “Trilogy of Optimization Pedagogy” (TOP) can be applied to decrease translation errors and obtain quality translations step by step. The trilogy of optimization are as follows: firstly to practice making multiple versions for the same source sentence from various perspectives until most satisfactory ones are obtained; secondly to practice looking back and forth within larger textual combinations to evaluate critically and penetratingly those different versions for clumsiness or harshness whatsoever in each; and thirdly to practice refining cohesion and coherence in larger textual combinations so as to create a final target text with holistically optimal quality, style and effect. Students’ awareness of continuous optimization can be gradually developed and consolidated in these procedures and three important translation competences, namely sentence generating competence, critical evaluation competence, and text refining competence, can be effectively improved by following this TOP model.

Keywords: Trilogy of Optimization Pedagogy (TOP), sentence generating competence, critical evaluation competence, text refining competence

Author: Liyuan Peng, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University of Technology, Zhuzhou, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2022.04.010