The individual-sentence translation exercises in the textbooks widely used by non-English majors in China,in the long run,create two misconceptions in the learners:1)one English sentence becomes one Chinese sentence when translated; 2)the syntaxes of the two languages are similar.The drawbacks have resulted in a deficiency in writing and translation skills in the learners.This inappropriate design ignores the basic linguistic principles in translation science,pragmatics,and contrastive studies of English and Chinese.Changes with the constitution of the translation exercises are imperative to improve the translation teaching.
