Translation as a Method in Teaching ESP: An Example from the Secretarial English Course

Given that the core objective of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is to enable students to effectively engage in specialized communication within their professional fields, it is crucial for ESP learners to become active participants in their professional discourse communities and to accurately use specialized terminology in various contexts. However, for students with average English proficiency, ESP teaching needs to be continuously adjusted, with the principle of adjustment being based on the overall improvement of students’ English application ability. To truly enable students to participate in the learning process, integrating translation methods with ESP teaching has become a feasible teaching approach. To verify the feasibility of this method, this paper takes the Secretarial English course — offered by the College English Department of Zhejiang Yuexiu University of Foreign Languages — as a case study. By discussing task-oriented training activities (vocabulary, sentence patterns, dialogues, and translation) centered on practicing translation methods for Chinese Language and Culture majors, it illustrates how the use of translation methods enhances students’ communicative competence in real-life scenarios, enables them to identify cultural effects, and fosters a cooperative learning environment. Such cooperation also represents an adaptable teaching mode that meets the demands of the contemporary ESP post-methods era. The effectiveness of the approach is evidenced by students’ mastery of the relevant final-exam topics and by their relatively improved linguistic performance.