Abstract
The development of wireless communication technology and the widespread application of big data has accelerated the degree of globalization. Both English and Chinese are widely used languages internationally, and the cultural exchanges between the two occupy a very important proportion in the world. The society’s demand for English-Chinese translation talents has increased, and colleges and universities have also taken measures to improve students’ English-Chinese translation ability. This article analyzes the English-Chinese translation course under the environment of wireless communication and big data, discusses the influence of the development of wireless communication and big data on the teaching of English-Chinese translation, the problems existing in the teaching of English-Chinese translation in colleges and universities, and gives solutions to the existing problems. Finally, using the method of online survey to investigate the current situation of English-Chinese translation teaching in colleges and universities in the province, 245 valid questionnaires were recovered, only 87 of which indicated that their majors offered separate English translation courses, accounting for 35.51% of the total; 158 indicated their majors. There are no English translation courses, accounting for 64.49% of the total. Such a ratio does not match the overall demand for cultural exchanges in the context of the rapid development of wireless technology and big data. Therefore, the convenience brought by new technologies should be actively used to promote the development of the English-Chinese translation teaching system in colleges and universities.
1. Introduction
Traditional English teaching has been unable to meet the current situation. It is inevitable to introduce new teaching models into English teaching. English-Chinese translation teaching has always been the shortcoming of many universities. English-Chinese translation ability is a major indicator to measure English proficiency, and it occupies an important position in many English exams. The network learning platform, smart campus, and flipped classroom have pointed out new directions for education reform. Rethinking positioning of translation education in a wireless communication and big data environment, finding out the shortcomings, breaking the convention, and using wireless communication and big data technology to reform English-Chinese teaching is an effective strategy to improve students’ English-Chinese translation level and overall English level.
Soang found that many students are accustomed to using spoken language to write text when translating but ignore the importance of mother tongue knowledge and cultural factors, resulting in improper translation. Therefore, he designed a new teaching model that can practice translation in class. After evaluating the translation process through multidisciplinary evaluation methods, it can help students understand the working principles of translation and use reasonable methods to solve translation problems [1]. Qiao and Wang analyzed the characteristics of mobile teaching from the perspective of constructivism and constructed a new mobile interactive translation teaching model. Then, they verified the model with WeChat, QQ, and Weibo as examples and pointed out that the Internet translation teaching is about to become the norm [2]. Lin and Yip found corpus-assisted translation education can accomplish teaching goals. They proposed an application improvement plan for the corpus in view of its goals, data alignment methods, data annotation systems, and function keys [3].
English-Chinese translation is a way to promote cultural exchange. As the main force of country’s modernization, young college students should have the ability to read foreign language documents without barriers and fluent English communication. Today, English-Chinese translation teaching is only the reading comprehension and English level test. This article mainly analyzes the points of English-Chinese translation education and puts forward corresponding suggestions.
2. Demand Analysis of English-Chinese Translation Courses and Research on Teaching Countermeasures
2.1. English-Chinese Translation Teaching in a Wireless Communication and Big Data Environment
Under Internet technology constantly developing, my country’s education has undergone tremendous changes due to its influence. Wireless communication and big data can provide personalized, collection, mining, management, analysis, and other services, and it has achieved the ultimate in information integration and resource sharing. It can not only provide a comfortable and convenient teaching environment but also collect online teaching resources for use in English-Chinese translation teaching and cultivate students’ good learning. Get used to a comprehensive level of students’ English ability. The smart learning platform can provide a wealth of teaching services, including teacher preparation and teaching and tutoring, as well as students’ preclass preparation and after-class review.
2.2. The Necessity of English-Chinese Translation Teaching
Translation of English-Chinese is an important part of College English Test Four and Six, and research is an important part of the entrance examination, and it is a prerequisite for cultivating students’ listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. English-Chinese translation mainly tests the students’ English reading comprehension ability and Chinese language expression ability [4]. The basic premise of expressing one’s thoughts in written language is reading comprehension ability, that is, obtaining information through reading the original text and understanding it. Translation is a common means to check whether the obtained information is correct. If the knowledge level of the foreign language is poor, the correct information to be expressed in the original text cannot be obtained, and the translation will inevitably be wrong. In addition. If the meaning of the original text is understood, but the language expression ability of Chinese is not good or the translation skill is lacking, such translations are often prone to ambiguity or language expression does not conform to the Chinese standard [5]. Therefore, it is particularly important to improve students’ English-Chinese translation ability. This will not only help improve students’ translation level and master the basic knowledge of Chinese but also promote students’ open thinking and correct language learning from different language perspectives.
2.3. Problems in College English-Chinese Translation Teaching
2.3.1. The School Does Not Pay Enough Attention to College English Translation Teaching
In undergraduate English teaching, most of the guidance focus is still oriented to passing the course test and English level. In addition, traditional English teaching mainly focuses on vocabulary, grammar, and listening teaching. It usually leads to that the students are good at answering the test papers correctly but are not fluent. Translation teaching in university classrooms is relatively small, and teachers seldom use translation as a main content for teaching. Even if it involves translation, it requires the general meaning of the original text to be summarized completely, and students are allowed to practice translation sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. In the selected English textbooks, the theories and space involved in translation are also relatively small [6, 7]. Therefore, many students can understand the general idea of the article when doing reading comprehension but will get entangled when doing the question. This is because there is no systematic translation training that leads to students’ incomplete grasp of the original content.
2.3.2. Pay Attention to Knowledge Mastering and Neglect the Cultivation of Language Communication Ability
Language is an important tool for humans to express their thoughts and emotions. If language learning is only included in textbooks and exams, it will have no practical meaning. The most important thing in learning English is to be able to understand what is meant to be expressed in English and to be able to relay it in English or mother tongue in your own words. English teaching in many domestic universities only requires students to master the textbooks and test content, and English translation only needs to look at the general idea and sentence structure. The English test scores are used to measure students’ English level, which makes students fall into a misunderstanding in English learning-rote memorization, but they are confused when they speak [8].
2.3.3. Lack of Cultural Theory Teaching
Translation is not a simple paraphrase, but a linguistic creative activity of cross-cultural awareness. English represents Western culture, and Chinese represents Chinese national culture. They are two different social ideologies. Specifically, culture includes content such as religious beliefs, geographic customs, and academic thoughts. It is often just a direct translation, and no time is spent comparing and exploring the Eastern and Western cultures involved. Such translation is also relatively rigid and lacks charm [9, 10].
2.4. Teaching Strategies of College English-Chinese Translation
2.4.1. Optimize the Teaching System of College English Courses
It is very important to cultivate high-quality comprehensive talents. Globalization has long been a reality, and mastering an international common language is one of the talent standards in the new era. Today, society has more diverse requirements for language talents, and college English teaching concepts and teaching methods should also be changed as soon as possible. Establish a complete English teaching system and carry out teaching from all aspects of language learning. We should ensure that students can improve their translation ability after acquiring English knowledge. Organize English translation competitions and offer English translation elective courses to increase students’ interest. Improve proportion of English translation, including sentence translation and paragraph translation [11].
2.4.2. Strengthen the Cultivation of Cultural Awareness
Translation is an effective way to promote the exchange and integration of different cultures, and the conversion between languages needs to include the change of different cultural consciousness. Therefore, in college English translation teaching, teachers should popularize language and culture involved in English and Chinese, analyze differences in language expression and cultural differences between them, then use translation skills to minimize the differences, and improve the quality of translation [12].
2.4.3. Cultivate Students’ Self-Learning Ability
Students need to have a proactive thirst for knowledge and the ability to learn independently. English teaching resources available to students are at your fingertips, including not only literature but also explanation videos by teachers and experts. Students can learn English knowledge in advance in many ways with better classroom learning results. Therefore, guiding students to develop study habits after class on English-Chinese translation is important.
2.4.4. Fully Explore Wireless Communication and Big Data Teaching Technology and Resources
College English translation teaching ushered in a key opportunity for transformation. However, there are large amount of fragmentation of information in wireless communication and big data, there are many problems in building a teaching environment and grasping teaching content. Therefore, when constructing an English translation teaching model, we should focus on teaching situation, role transformation and communication. Use modern information technology to fully integrate teaching resources, innovate English-Chinese teaching methods, change traditional English-Chinese teaching concepts, and use intelligent teaching equipment to create efficient and vivid English-Chinese translation classrooms.
3. Explore the Teaching Experiment of English-Chinese Translation Course under the Background of Wireless Communication and Big Data
3.1. Experimental Content
In order to understand the teaching status of English-Chinese translation courses in English classrooms in the province, this paper designs a questionnaire about English-Chinese translation classrooms based on the background of wireless communication and big data. The main content of the questionnaire includes the teaching methods and teaching effects of the English-Chinese translation classroom in the school, and the students’ needs for the English-Chinese translation classroom.
3.2. Experimental Process
According to the experimental content and referring to the questionnaire design specifications, the specific content of the questionnaire was designed. Distributed in the form of an online questionnaire. A total of 245 questionnaires were collected, and the collected questionnaires were collected for data statistics and then analyzed. Finally, summarize the results of the questionnaire survey and give corresponding suggestions based on the results. In the process of data collection and processing, the experiment used the following Formula (1) and (2):
Sample variance formula:
Sample standard deviation formula:
4. Analysis of English-Chinese Translation Course Teaching
4.1. Analysis of Teaching Methods of English-Chinese Translation Course
The questionnaire designed “Does your major offer a separate English translation course?” and “How does the teacher teach English-Chinese translation knowledge in class?” Some relevant data and statistical results are as follows.
From Figure 1, we can see that 87 of the surveyed persons indicated that their majors have opened an English translation course alone, accounting for 35.51% of the total; 158 of them said that their majors did not provide additional English translation courses, accounting for the total 64.49%.
According to the conclusions drawn in Figure 1, it can be seen from Table 1 and Figure 2 that the majors that have opened English translation courses are still based on practical teaching and theory teaching, and the interpretation teaching is relatively small. For the majors that do not have English translation courses, practical teaching is the main English translation teaching method, and the other three teaching methods are rarely used. Regardless of whether English translation courses are offered, English-Chinese translation teaching is lacking in cultural background comparison and interpretation teaching. Both English and Chinese have a particularly important position in the world, and both represent excellent national culture. If there is a lack of theoretical teaching, the English-Chinese translation teaching will also lose its soul. It will not expand the students’ cognition but also make the English-Chinese translation only stay in surface.
4.2. Analysis of the Teaching Effect of English-Chinese Translation
In order to improve the level of English-Chinese translation teaching, an English-Chinese translation question was designed in the questionnaire. The content of the question is an English paragraph. The results are scored from the main idea of the paragraph, sentence structure, detail processing, word and sentence application, and connotation. The statistical score is calculated as an average.
In Figure 3, we can see that the average score of English-Chinese translation is 87.82 for majors that have opened an English-Chinese translation course. In the statistical process, it is found that there is basically no problem in their translation, but the translated sentences need emotional expression. The average score of majors that did not offer an English translation course was 63.54 points. They only managed to express the paragraphs in a clear way without paying attention to details and emotional connotations.
The development of technologies such as wireless communication and big data analysis has provided strong support for us to better promote the progress of English-Chinese translation courses. First of all, we can actively develop various learning apps, so that students can make full use of the fragmented time for learning. Secondly, the school has made it into an auxiliary resource in line with its own teaching characteristics through the collection and editing of network resources. The third is to provide students with a more open space for communication, so that they can improve their English-Chinese translation skills by listening and using more.
5. Conclusions
In the background of wireless communication and big data, society has more stringent requirements for language talents. College English teaching must keep up with the trend of the times, change teaching methods. English-Chinese translation teaching should be treated as the focus of College English teaching, establish a systematic English-Chinese translation teaching system, and use English-Chinese translation materials and advanced experience on the Internet to improve students’ translation level. Traditional English-Chinese translation teaching modes need reform and innovation, formulate personalized teaching plans based on students’ actual English-Chinese translation level, and provide qualified translators to the society.
Data Availability
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares that they have no conflicts of interest.