Developing Business CAT Teaching System and Course for Chinese Universities

Rationale of Business CAT Course

With the globalized economy and China’s opening up to the outside, a large proportion of document translation, such as business letters, bank statements, legal contracts and sales reports become a challenge to the business English majors. These documents are suitable for computer-aided translation as they are very professional and formatted with regular terminologies (Wu, 2006). As a result, business CAT skills are one of the core competencies required for business English and translation students by translation companies. Unlike machine translation, computer-aided translation mainly adopts translation memory (TM) technology, which can automatically memorize and retrieve repeated or similar words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs as well as storing the translated texts. During the process, the system gradually creates a huge database in the computer. It automatically retrieves the most suitable and various versions of the same translation in the corpus, thus increasing translation accuracy and efficiency dramatically.

The authors think that a business CAT course should be included in teaching programs for business English and translation students so as to train their abilities of CAT techniques and business knowledge and translation skills. In China, translation and business English students, translation students and teachers as well as college translation programs should have far-sighted vision to reform their courses and curriculum, so that students learn the competitive and professional skills for future employment.