The Inherent Text Difficulty Consistency of Parallel Translation Tasks in CET-4

The Inherent Text Difficulty Consistency of Parallel Translation Tasks in CET-4

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College English Test 4 (CET-4) is a high-stakes test in China. Since December 2013, its translation task has been reformed and there are three parallel translation tasks for one test from which only one is randomly assigned to a test taker. Therefore, the text difficulty consistency issue becomes particularly important for CET-4 translation tasks. This paper collected 51 translation task texts from December 2013 to December 2021 and examined their inherent text difficulty with the corpus tool, the Chi-Editor. The texts were divided into groups randomly, by their text difficulty values, and by the test months. The text difficulty values were then analyzed with a paired and independent t-test through SPSS 23.0. The results showed that there were significant differences in the inherent text difficulty level among the three parallel translation tasks if they were divided based on their text difficulty level indexed by Chi-Editor, but the difficulty differences in parallel translation tasks were not salient if they were grouped randomly or by test months. It was suggested that more carefulness should be exercised with the development of CET-4 parallel translation tasks to secure the inherent text difficulty consistency and thus guarantee fairness for each individual test taker.