Along with the increasing interest in learning-centred constructivist approaches to translator education, there have been proposals to introduce project-based learning (PjBL), popular in education, to the teaching of translation. Typical of this approach is that students are usually invited to complete an authentic practical translation project either in small groups or as individuals. This article, however, presents another type of project in translator education and discusses how such a project was incorporated into the teaching of business translation in the Chinese context. Furthermore, it reports on an investigation of the students’ reception and perceptions of the PjBL project, which was carried out as part of the evaluation process of the project. It is hoped that the documenting of our experimentation with the project may serve as an easy reference for other teachers who may be interested in trying this methodology in their teaching, and that the findings regarding the students’ perceptions mainly investigated through qualitative methods can be further confirmed with future quantitative research designs.

Following an earlier study by the same author on professional translators which appeared in Target 2000 (12:1 127-149), this article reports on an empirical study, based on both quantitative and qualitative data, on the learning needs of translation students, another major stakeholder in translator training. This study shows that contrary to a widely held assumption, the great majority of students taking translation did not and do not intend to be professional translators/interpreters. It is found that translation students prized training of both L1 and L2 before or during translation training, and that they preferred practice-oriented courses to theoretical courses. Also revealed in this study is that many students believe the current translation program does not reflect the market needs very well and that measures such as offering more practical courses, strengthening language training, teachers’ providing more detailed comments on assignments, etc., must be taken in order to improve the program. Based on such findings, a comparison with the earlier study on professional translators is made and pedagogical implications are also drawn in relation to some of the focal issues in translator training.

Translating from Chinese into another language or vice versa is becoming a widespread phenomenon. However, current neuroimaging studies are insufficient to reveal the neural mechanism underlying translation asymmetry during Chinese/English sight translation. In this study, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to extract the brain activation patterns associated with Chinese/English sight translation. Eleven unbalanced Chinese (L1)/English (L2) bilinguals participated in this study based on an intra-group experimental design, in which two translation and two reading aloud tasks were administered: forward translation (from L1 to L2), backward translation (from L2 to L1), L1 reading, and L2 reading. As predicted, our findings revealed that forward translation elicited more pronounced brain activation in Broca’s area, suggesting that neural correlates of translation vary according to the direction of translation. Additionally, significant brain activation in the left PFC was involved in backward translation, indicating the importance of this brain region during the translation process. The identical activation patterns could not be discovered in forward translation, indicating the cognitive processing of reading logographic languages (i.e. Chinese) might recruit incongruent brain regions.

Hongloumeng by Xueqin Cao (Hsueh-ch‘in Ts'ao) is generally considered one of the greatest classical Chinese novel. Of all nine published English translations known today, the one translated by Hawkes and Minford (the Story of the Stone, Penguin, 1973–86) and the other by Yang and Yang (A Dream of Red Mansions¹, Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, 1978–80) are the best known among translators and literary scholars. Over the years, both have been carefully scrutinized and much critiqued. Translators and translation scholars have been engaged in heated debates over salient features of the translations, strategies employed by the translators, the possible effects of the two translations and so on [cf. Liu and Gu (1997) On translation of cultural contents in Hong Lou Meng [in Chinese]. Chinese Translators Journal, 1: 16–19; Wang (2001) A Comparative Study of the English Translations of Poetry in Hong Lou Meng. Xi’an: Shanxi Normal University Press; Feng (2006) On the Translation of Hong Lou Meng [in Chinese]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press; Liu (2008), Translating tenor: With reference to the English versions of Hong Lou Meng. Meta, 53(3): 528–48], with the eventual aim to determine which translation better captures the style of the original text or author. Like many debates of similar nature, no definitive conclusions have been reached despite such an intense interest. We believe a corpus-assisted examination [Baker, M. (2000). Towards a methodology for investigating the style of a literary translator. Target, 12(2): 241–66; Baker, M. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In Gill, F., Baker, M., and Tognini-Bonelli, E. (eds), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 233–50] of the two translations will provide more convincing analysis and can better describe the differences in the translation style of the two famous translations. A particular effort is further made to interpret the reasons for the different strategies adopted by the two different pairs of translators in the social, political, and ideological context of the translations.