earticle

영어

This study examined the beginning translation competence of language learners as to what sub-competencies or elements of their competence contribute to improving their translations. To do this, English into Korean translation was made by 27 senior English-major college students, who were divided into three groups (X-group, BK-group, and Vocab-group), and their translations were evaluated holistically in terms of meaning and form and translation errors were analyzed also. Vocab-group was provided with a word list from the English text with the Korean meanings. BK-group was given a Korean parallel text which dealt with the subject of the target text. X-group translated with no such word list and Korean text. Self-ratings were also conducted questioning their ‘interest in translation/interpretation’, ‘general current affairs knowledge’, ‘knowledge of the text subject’, and ‘knowledge of the text vocabulary’. It turned out that Vocab-group excelled BK-group and X-group in their translation, whereas BK-group and X-group showed little differences. The self-ratings exhibited similar results: Vocab-group evaluated themselves especially highly on the vocabulary knowledge and BK-group rather low on the subject knowledge. It was also found that their ratings of the vocabulary knowledge correlated with their translation systematically and positively and this wasn't the case with the subject knowledge. The findings here show that knowledge of the text vocabulary, not knowledge of the text subject, is a major element which helps producing higher-quality translation. and this is so at least for novice translators.