1 Introduction

This section introduces the shifting mission of foreign language education in the context of building "New Liberal Arts" and enhancing the effectiveness of international communication, along with the objectives of launching the multilingual "Understanding Contemporary China" course series. It identifies the challenges students face in translating core political terms, the shortcomings of traditional translation teaching models, and the specific difficulties undergraduates encounter in political translation. It proposes integrating the genre analysis theory of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and authoritative texts such as the "Basic Norms (English)" to construct a comprehensive teaching process. Driven by the dual cores of normative awareness and evidence-based practice, this approach aims to reshape students' translation thinking. The section also describes an instructional experiment involving 67 undergraduate foreign language majors at Beijing Foreign Studies University, designed to explore the practical effectiveness of this instructional design in addressing the identified difficulties, thereby providing empirical reference and a methodological framework for cultivating high-level foreign language professionals.

2 Related Research and Theoretical Foundation

This section delves into the theoretical foundation of the "Understanding Contemporary China" Chinese-English translation instructional design, emphasizing the paramount importance of normative awareness in political translation. Normative awareness is not merely a technical guideline for language conversion but fundamentally reflects political stance. Political translation must adhere to the "Basic Norms for Translating Contemporary Chinese Political Discourse · English," which concretizes norms into core dimensions such as major concepts, sensitive expressions, proper nouns, technical terms, and publication styles. The political alignment of major concepts, steadfast adherence to stances in sensitive expressions, and professional presentation of publication styles constitute three key aspects of normative awareness in political translation. Furthermore, the chapter introduces ESP genre analysis theory, providing an analytical framework and rhetorical pathway for constructing the normativity of political discourse. Through ESP genre analysis, students are guided to use corpus tools for in-depth comparison and feature identification between Chinese and Western political texts, achieving normative reconstruction at the discourse level. Simultaneously, the instructional design integrates the concept of "dual-track integration and balanced internal-external focus" from textbook compilation and application, aiming to cultivate students' standardized awareness. This equips them with the professional competence to identify boundaries, verify standards, and follow norms in complex contexts, thereby facilitating a transformation from mere language learners to discourse constructors with international communication literacy.

3 Teaching Steps and Implementation Process

This chapter details the Chinese-English translation instructional design and implementation process for the "Understanding Contemporary China" textbook. Based on a translation competence model and genre analysis theory, the research moves beyond traditional linear teaching models to construct a four-phase cyclical pedagogy: "Diagnosis—Evidence-based Practice—Reconstruction—Adaptation." First, through terminology blind tests and difficulty diagnosis, students' real problems in translation practice are exposed, such as misunderstandings of core terms, inappropriate use of Chinese-style collocations, and fractured syntactic logic. Teachers conduct in-depth corrections and data mining to establish an "error archive" and analyze anonymized typical cases, stimulating students' desire for knowledge. Second, in the phase of corpus verification and norm establishment, teachers guide students to use authoritative corpora, implement a dual-source verification mechanism, and cultivate their awareness of evidence and rigorous normative consciousness. The third phase focuses on logical reconstruction and syntactic optimization, addressing the cross-linguistic tension in genre and syntax between Chinese and Western political texts. Through visual syntactic analysis tools, students are guided to achieve hypotactic transformation of discourse. Finally, in the phase of variant generation and audience adaptation, students are guided to perform differentiated discourse reconstruction for different target audiences, cultivating their cross-cultural awareness and communication efficacy thinking. The entire teaching process aims to guide students' transition from novice translators to quasi-professional translators, enhancing their ability to tell China's stories well in the international arena of public opinion.

4 Teaching Case Analysis and Effect Evaluation

Through empirical research, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the learning outcomes of 67 undergraduate foreign language majors at Beijing Foreign Studies University under the "Understanding Contemporary China" Chinese-English translation instructional design. The research selects two translation assignments from the beginning and end of the semester as samples, employing a combination of quantitative statistics and micro-text analysis to investigate the impact of instructional intervention on students' translation competence. The study finds that after one semester of instructional intervention, the total number of errors in students' translations significantly decreased, with the most notable reduction being in terminology mistranslations. This indicates a qualitative leap in students' normative awareness and verification abilities regarding political term translation. Simultaneously, through the analysis of four micro-cases, the chapter demonstrates the cognitive transformation students underwent in areas such as the political alignment of core terms, corpus verification of Chinese-style collocations, logical explication and genre reconstruction of long, complex sentences, and political judgment of sensitive expressions. This reflects students' role transformation from mere language converters to conscious guardians of national discourse.

5 Conclusion and Teaching Implications

Through a one-semester action research project, this study validates the effectiveness of an instructional design for the "Understanding Contemporary China" Chinese-English translation course that is grounded in normativity and centered on evidence-based awareness. Establishing normative awareness for political alignment, cultivating evidence-based awareness for translation, and following the progressive law of competence advancement are the three core findings of this research. The study confirms that terminology tracing and verification training can effectively reduce the mistranslation rate of core political terms, helping students transition from language converters to conscious upholders of political discourse. Furthermore, the "teaching-how-to-fish" verification training can fundamentally reshape students' translation thinking, endowing them with technically empowered problem-solving abilities to handle complex translation tasks. Additionally, the research finds that the cultivation of political translation competence is a gradual process, and teachers should further strengthen cross-linguistic syntactic comparison and logical explicitness training in subsequent instruction. This study provides a replicable and verifiable empirical case for the "Understanding Contemporary China" translation course in higher education institutions, holding profound theoretical significance and practical value for cultivating high-quality translation professionals for international engagement.