On J. House's Model For Translation Quality Assessment And Its Application To Chinese-English Translation

Nowadays, with the development of information technology, it is quite easy for people to find access to many different translation versions of the same book. This has to some extent helped to make the evaluation of translation texts more appealing to people's attention. When doing researches about the development of translation criticism, Gerard Mcalester (2000: 231) points out that up until now there are only two influential books concerning translation criticism. One of them is J. House's A Model for Translation Quality Assessment (1977) and its later version Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited (1997). The other is Katharina Reiss's Translation Criticism: Prospects and Limitations (2000). J. House's model is mainly based on Hallidayan functional and systematic theory, discourse analysis and pragmatic theory. The operation of the model involves initially a detailed analysis of the source text according to a set of situational dimensions. Then the resulting textual profile serves as the norm against which the translated text is measured. The final statement of translation quality consists of the degree to which the textual profile and function of the translated text match that of the original.This study attempts to apply J. House's model for TQA to the evaluation of Chinese-English translation and test its availability. The study case is To Live, the English version of To Live by Chinese writer Yu Hua a representative of Chinese avant-garde writers. An evaluation of such a book is supposed to highlight the significance of House's TQA and provide people with appropriate approaches to TQA of Chinese to English translation.This thesis ends up with the following findings:1) An objective, convincing statement can be achieved by applying the model.2) Though there are some defects in the model, For instance, the actual operation of the model seems to be a little cumbersome and some of the categories are overlapping, it can be successfully applied to Chinese–English translation.