Developing cross-cultural communication competence through translation

This paper aims to discuss the need to develop cross-cultural communication competence through translation for pre-service translators who are studying various translation programs at university level. Specifically it covers two points. First, it discusses the equivalence issues include linguistic equivalence and pragmatic equivalence. Contrast of linguistic differences between a few culture-loaded words in Chinese and English leads to the finding that the meaning of the source language (SL) seems to be equivalent to that of target language (TL), but examination of their lexical background tells they are not all equivalents due to cultural differences between the source culture (SC) and target culture (TC). Additionally Chinese translation as a TL is found more pragmatically dependent than English as an SL. Second, it exemplifies further differences between SL and TL in terms of dictions used in translation. It is evidenced that the choice of words used in English tends to be more general and can be applied to negative-neutral-positive statement or description while that in Chinese is more specific, distinctively disclosing either negative, neutral or positive emotions wherever appropriate and taking on black-or-white colours. The discussion calls for developing linguistic-socio-cultural-and-pragmatic competence in pre-service translators so that they grow linguistically and cross-culturally competent in their future professional practices