Effects of Vocabulary Knowledge and Translating Competence on the Comprehensive English Ability

The purpose of this thesis is to reveal the characteristics of participants' vocabulary size and their translating competence as well as the correlation between their vocabulary size and their comprehensive English ability, the correlation between their translating competence and comprehensive English ability. Eighty-two junior English majors from Wuzhou University took the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test, Receptive Vocabulary Levels Test and China Accreditation Test for Translator (CATT) mock test Level 3. All of their scores of TEM-4 were analyzed via SPSS16.0. The findings are as follows: 1) Participants performed better in receptive vocabulary size test than in productive vocabulary size; 2) There is significant correlation between participants' productive vocabulary size and their comprehensive English ability; 3) Participants' productive vocabulary size can predict 19% of changes of their comprehensive English ability of the 3000 vocabulary frequency bands, and of the 5000 vocabulary frequency bands, the percentage is 39.5%; 4) For the correlation between participants' translating competence and their comprehensive English ability, the significance does exist; 5) Participant's English-Chinese translating competence can predict 19.8% of changes of their comprehensive English ability, while participants' Chinese-English translating competence can predict 14.5% of changes of their comprehensive English ability.