Annie Qian Xia

Towards Competence-based Translation Curricular Reform for MTI Programme in China

With the ever increasing globalization and interdependencies in economic development as well as economic development, China is in growing demand for qualified translators and interpreters. And this calls for the supply of translation education programmes at university level. With its launch in 2007, China’s Master in Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programme has seen its dramatic growth over the past decade. However, what an MTI programme should aim for has remained a question under debate. The paper reviews the discipline context of Translation Studies as well as the history and recent development of translation programmes in China.  The paper also examines the justification of underlying curriculum reform with the inclusion of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) as one of the core modules for MTI. And this will be done by the review and introduction of multiple well developed research projects/models and particular emphasis will be put on the review of a project promoting intercultural communicative competence for translation students. It concludes recent work from pedagogical /education oriented translation competence, arguing that a more holistic understanding of the translation curriculum must be reflected in series of the narrow, job-specific-competence-based training programme.  

Keywords: translation programme, education orientation, intercultural communicative competence

XIA Qian has been teaching Chinese-English interpreting and translation (translation technology included) for a number of years and prior to that, she had been teaching English for general purposes, for academic purposes and English accounting. She is now the Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting with the Department of English, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. Prior to this position, she took a similar role in The University of Nottingham, Ningbo China. Apart from teaching and dissertation supervising with universities, she is also actively involved in international conference interpreting. She has both monograph and translation works published with various publishers. Her recent interests of research include the inclusion of intercultural dimension in translation education programmes and automatic speech recognition and its role in the self-assessment in interpreting training and practice.