Reflection on Teacher Feedback in Hybrid Teaching of Translation

: In the context of the diversity and multi-modality of teaching feedback, the importance of teacher feedback has been impacted by online (computer) feedback and peer feedback, so it's necessary to highlight and give full play to the important role of teacher feedback. After analysis of the characteristics of hybrid translation teaching, the research asserts that all feedback should be given full play to their roles in translation teaching. Teachers are suggested focusing on students' necessities to offer re-feedback and deep feedback by highlighting key and difficult points, meanwhile, to enrich cultural literacy and provide value guidance as well as promoting students to actively perceive, understand and adopt feedback information are the core work of teacher’s feedback to improve translation teaching efficiently and effectively.


Introduction
With the development of Internet technology and the diversification of teaching methods, English translation teaching has integrated multi-approach, multi-channel and multi modals with digital tools, so the hybrid teaching model has already been prevalent in the teaching activities in conjunction with various modes of feedback, including teacher feedback, peer feedback (review assessment) and online (machine) feedback correspondingly.The various feedback modes not only complement each other to a certain extent, but also provide students different ways to obtain feedback and enrich their learning environment.It also gains researchers' attention to explore the advantages of new feedback modes and teacher feedback.As to translation, teacher feedback is crucial to support students in the process of mastering translation theory, applying translation skills and improving translation quality because it is born with linguistic, cultural, theoretical and practical characteristics.Therefore, it is essential to focus on analyzing the advantages of teacher feedback and exploring effective and appropriate teacher feedback strategies in order to enhance efficiency and practicality of translation teaching.

Literature Review
As to education, feedback refers to comments or information that students received in learning process from teachers or other students regarding the success of a particular learning task [1].It serves as a means to regulate and control teaching quality through external stimuli and assessments.Feedback offers teachers opportunities to communicate with their students, what's more, it is also a crucial way for teachers to assess the gap between what students acquired and what they desired to learn.
In the context of language teaching, aside from second language writing, translation teaching feedback has garnered researchers' significant attention.In 2014, Wu acknowledged the important role of teacher feedback in correcting students' translation errors [2].Zhao suggested that peer feedback emphasizes individual involvement and can help students surpass their zone of proximal development.She also emphasized that combining peer feedback with teacher feedback can further stimulate students' potentialities [3].Liu affirmed the positive impact of peer feedback and recommended it as a supplement to teacher feedback [4].Li and Wang conducted empirical comparative studies on peer feedback and teacher feedback concluding that peer feedback can be helpful in improving students' translation abilities [5], while combining both feedback modes is more effective to enhance students' overall language proficiency [6].With empirical experiment results, some other researchers like Xu, Yang, and Wang, etc., found that compared to relying solely on one type of feedback, a multi-modal and hybrid feedback approach is more effective in achieving teaching objectives in translation teaching [6,7,8].Of course, there are also voices of skepticism regarding the effectiveness of peer feedback in some studies [9,10].Overall, feedback plays a crucial role in teaching and learning process, and it can significantly impact students' language and translation skills, so researchers have been attracted to explore and refine feedback strategies to enhance English translation teaching.
In summary, research on teacher feedback in translation teaching has been influenced by various factors, including educational philosophies, machine translation, technological advancements and research methodologies, etc, which exhibits the following characteristics: First of all, the related researches have evolved from qualitative studies to predominantly empirical research.At the same time, more and more researchers have focused on empirical studies to examine the effectiveness of different feedback approaches.
Secondly, more and more empirical studies asserted that other forms of feedback, such as peer assessment, selfassessment and automated feedback from internet are inseparable from teacher feedback, so "teacher+" feedback, an integrated pattern can enhance the effectiveness of translation teaching significantly.
When teacher feedback consistently gained significant attention, there are still some noteworthy observations: As teaching feedback methods have become more diverse, teacher feedback are stuck with competition from other forms of feedback, in other word, researches on teacher feedback has been in a relative stagnation.
In the context of hybrid teaching models, teachers exactly encounter a more complex "teacher+" feedback mode.However, rare research published effective and verified ways of teacher feedback in answer to such hybrid environments.Therefore, it is necessary to reevaluate teacher feedback in translation teaching by taking into account the characteristics of hybrid teaching models, at the same time, it is also essential to reflect on how to provide effective teacher feedback in these contexts for advancing effective and efficient translation education.

Hybrid Translation Teaching
Translation is a cultural activity where a translator conveys the information contained in one language to another language [11].The activities of translation teaching aims to cultivate individual translators with solid language foundation, extensive cultural knowledge and proficient translation skills.Therefore, translation teaching and translation teachers undertake various and unique missions.
First and foremost, translation is fundamentally activities of information transfer of cross languages, which requires the bilingual competence of translators as the cornerstone of their jobs.Thus, the essential requirement is the faithful conveyance of information, what's more, translation would not occur only after translator's achieving perfect language proficiency.However, the fact is that insufficient language competence can directly lead to problems such as information omission, over reliance on the source language as well as communication errors, etc., which result in inaccurate information transmission, and so on.Therefore, a solid linguistic foundation and the ability to provide feedback on language issues to students are fundamental qualities for translation teachers.
Secondly, translation activities not only rely on translation knowledge and skills but also require practical verification and reinforcement.Translation theory is the system of experiential knowledge system that translators extracted and summarized from their translation practice and that serves as a guide for translation practice.A systematic understanding of translation theory can help students address issues related to homogeneity and similarity and enhance their translation abilities ultimately.However, comprehending and applying these theories into practice often requires the guidance from their teachers who can simplify complex concepts and offer them with clear and professional instructions.
Finally, as is well known, one of the primary tasks of translators is to bridge the gap across cultural differences and facilitate the transmission of cultural and value-related information.Therefore, the characteristics of communication studies have become increasingly prominent.With the connection and integration of different languages and cultures, all the accessible texts carry a wealth of diverse information values, thoughts and ideas deeply rooted in the source language as well as its history and times; On the other hand, each translator is an individual with their own political, social and ideological perspectives.Thus, translation teaching serves as a gateway to uphold native culture and values while embracing foreign cultures and differences.In this context, translation teachers play a crucial role as organizers and disseminators from ideological to ethical education, at the same time they bear the primary responsibility for nurturing cultural custodians who can preserve and transmit their cultural heritage correspondingly.

Hybrid Translation Teaching and Teaching Feedback
After the introduction of various digital technologies, such as platforms, software, micro courses and videos in translation teaching, hybrid teaching mode has become the norm in teaching, and teaching feedback thereby has shown diversified and multi-modal characteristics in terms of types, forms, approaches and content.

Diversified Feedback
When it comes to teaching feedback in translation education, it has broken through the traditional mode of teacher-centered feedback and evolved to online feedback, peer feedback, self-feedback, even a shift from unified classroom feedback by teachers to decentralized feedback outside the classroom.The trend of diversified feedback has taken shape thereby.To some extent, respective and unique features of these feedback came into being, but none of them can entirely replace the others due to their inherent limitations.
Teacher feedback has its own advantages, stemming from the teacher's professional expertise in translation and feedback skills, which determines that teacher feedback is specific, authoritative, targeted and flexible.However, the constraints of time and energy make it a huge challenge for teachers to provide comprehensive feedback for all students and each aspects of the required training.Moreover, teacher might overlook some language errors for reasons, and their feedback may be delayed, too.On the other hand, online feedback excels in its timeliness, updating or repeating feedback after each submission of the assignments with its accurate big data and algorithms for comprehensive and accurate metalinguistic feedback.However, it is inevitable for mechanical statistics and algorithms to offer appropriate suggestion to feedback some inter-sentence and interlingual problems, so students, as receivers may struggle with crosscultural nuances and translation knowledge and skills.
Peer feedback, on the other hand, offers a sense of camaraderie and similar learning experiences.It fosters a relaxed learning atmosphere and promotes active learning by enhancing awareness of translation quality.However, the effectiveness of peer feedback would be significantly disappointing due to peers' translation knowledge, skills and attitudes toward feedback from their peers.So some researches claimed that peer feedback is generally regarded as feasible and acceptable while others argues that effectiveness of peer feedback remains a subject of debate because the effectiveness can be influenced by many factors, such as composition and coordination of groups, different characteristics and learning abilities of members [12].
Obviously, a diversified feedback mode is both a response to the fundamental characteristics of hybrid translation teaching and an inevitable outcome of development of modern teaching.For students, diversified feedback allows them to receive suggestion and guidance through various means, which help them to assess their learning status quo from multiple perspectives and make full use of the advantages of diversified feedback subjectively to enhance efficiency, multi-dimension and comprehensiveness of their learning.

Multi-modal Feedback
Zhang believes that multi-modal discourse refers to the phenomenon of using multiple sensory organs (auditory, visual, tactile, etc.) to communicate through various symbolic resources and means such as language, text, images, videos, actions and audio, etc. [13].Multi-modal teaching feedback refers to the evaluation, guidance and teacher-student communication conducted in teaching activities involved various symbolic resources and methods via stimulating and mobilizing the various sensory organs of the feedback recipients.Timeliness and inter-activeness gives teacher's oral feedback an incomparable advantage, but the short retention time may limit the depth and effectiveness of student understanding; feedback in written form can provide textual information for retention, but it often suffers from time gaps and possibilities of further interaction between teacher and students.
Currently, rapid developments in internet technology and multimedia have given rise to various virtual simulation projects facilitated by technologies like WeChat, Meeloun, DingTalk, BlueMooc, Coursera, and so on.These technologies have created a sense of immersion for teaching, so feedback has also broken through limitations of time, space and technology, offering a wealth of resources such as documents, images, websites, micro-lessons, audio, video and so on.From a technical perspective, these resources provides students with a readable, visible, audible and discursive feedback mode from a technical perspective, which make feedback efficiently and easy to be accepted by learners.In short, multi-modal feedback can meet students' different preferences, stimulate their learning interest and enhance their autonomous learning ability [14].Therefore, multi-modal feedback has also become one of characteristics of the feedback in hybrid translation teaching.

Teaching Feedback Strategies in Hybrid Translation Teaching
As is well known, translation teaching involves linguistic, cultural, theoretical and practical aspects.When it develops to the stage of hybrid teaching, based themselves on the characteristics of the subject, teachers need to integrate the features of hybrid teaching and take the following aspects into account to enhance teaching effectiveness.
Firstly, teacher should highlight teacher feedback as a dominant role and optimize the other feedback.Traditional translation teaching basically follows the model of "teacher imparting translation knowledge -student translationteacher feedback", so teachers play two primary roles: one is the narrator of theories, methods and strategies, etc., while the other role is the evaluator of student's translations production [15].In hybrid translation teaching, the two fundamental roles of teachers remain unchanged.So in teaching practice, teachers should monitor and participate in all feedback, select and control various feedback reasonably based on the teaching content to ensure that each type of feedback is utilized effectively.For instance, leveraging the advantages of big data and technology to detect and correct students' language issues; utilizing the advantages of peers with similar backgrounds to encourage active participation in peer assessment; promoting them to think actively so as to create a better learning atmosphere and enhance learner's awareness of translation quality.In summary, teachers need to fully understand the advantages of various feedback and fill in the gaps in other feedback.Most importantly, teacher should collect difficulties and keys from various feedback sources and help to solve these deep-seated problems and promote interaction and complementary between teachers, students, databases and the network so as to improve teaching efficiency from multiple perspectives.
Secondly, teacher should focus on effectiveness and track all feedback.As Price et Al.(2010) pointed out, feedback becomes effective only when students understand it, are willing to act on it, and can do so based on the feedback [16].This viewpoint aligns with the "student-centered" teaching philosophy.Therefore, as feedback is provided, teachers need follow up on various feedback data, urge students to write learning journals and engage in introspection or retrospective summaries.Additionally, teachers should compare the qualities and gaps in translations before and after feedback and assess whether the feedback has produced the desired effects so as to plan subsequent teaching tasks accordingly.In subsequent teaching, teachers need design relevant exercises targeting students' weaknesses and track the flows and curves of students' learning data and changes of students emotional and attitudes so that teacher can help to promote their active perception, understanding and adoption of feedback information.This is one of the most crucial tasks in teacher feedback.
Thirdly, teacher should emphasize cultural literacy and shape translator's ideologies and norms."Language and culture are inseparable; translation is not only the conversion of information between languages but also the dissemination of culture and consciousness, a collision and fusion of two cultures" [17].This viewpoint fully reveals the relationship between translation, language and culture.It also reminds us that another important task of teacher feedback is to help establish cultural communication awareness for learners and guide them to shape basic translation norms.As is well known, translation activities and content inevitably cover various aspects of politics, economy, history, culture, morality, society and so on, therefore, teachers should assist students to solve problems of translation in terms of knowledge and skills while also cultivating students' rigorous translation attitudes and norm.

Conclusion
Now that translation teaching integrates features of languages, culture, theories and practice, posing a more complex and diverse requirements for the tasks and content, teacher feedback shows a trend of diversification and multimodality in the the context of hybrid teaching.Through the above reflections, it is believed that in order to achieve the goal of effective and efficient enhancement of translation teaching feedback, teachers need to optimize various feedback methods to highlight the key and difficult points of learning and provide further feedback to fill in the gaps left by other feedback.Also, teacher need pay more attention to track all feedback so as to improve students' understanding and acceptance of the previous rounds of feedback.Additionally, teacher feedback should not neglect how to enhance students' cultural literacy and shape their objective translation attitudes and norms.In the context of hybrid translation teaching, teacher feedback remains their crucial role to fortify students translation competence and enhance efficiency and practicality of translation teaching.