| Yu Hua is one of the representatives of Chinese vanguard writers. He enjoys a high reputation in China and he has released many works which proved to be well received. His works have been selected as teaching materials in the textbooks of Chinese junior and senior high schools for several times and even became teaching materials for the textbooks in the western countries. After ten years’ accumulation, he released the first volume of Brothers in 2005 and the second volume in 2006. This full-length novel has received two totally different kinds of criticisms in China since its release. But it was highly spoken of in the western countries after its English version was released in America and England in 2009. The western media highly praised the novel as well as its author Yu Hua. So we can see that the English version of Brothers promotes its big success in the foreign countries, to some extent.The present study will choose the English version of Brothers as the research object of case study and textual analysis. The author adopts House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model to study the English version of Brothers. The aims of this study are to evaluate the translation quality of the English version of Brothers and the feasibility of House’s model in assessing the translation quality of Chinese-English full-length novels through the introduction of House’s model and its application in the assessment of the English version of Brothers. House’s model was based on her redefinitions of some concepts of translation studies and her own original terms. Later, she revised her original model and put forward the revised model. In her original model, she set two main dimensions for translation quality assessment, the dimension of language use and the dimension of language users. These two main dimensions include eight detailed dimensions. Later, House revised her original model and brought forward a revised model. The revised model absorbed Halliday’s register theory and reset the parameters in assessing translation quality. House proposed to compare the source text and the target text on the dimensions of field, tenor, and mode as well as genre. What is more, the comparisons on these dimensions should be carried on the lexical, syntactic and textual levels. After the introduction of House’s model, the revised model will be applied to compare the source text and the target text of Brothers on the eight dimensions and then the translation quality will be evaluated. The operation of House’s model in assessing translation goes as following:firstly, a comparison between the source text and the target text should be made on the dimensions of field, tenor, and mode as well as genre on the lexical, syntactic and textual levels. The dimension of field includes the situational dimensions of subject matter and social action. The dimension of tenor includes the dimensions of the author’s provenance and stance, social role relationship as well as social attitude while the dimension of mode includes medium and participation. Secondly, the analysis of the source text and the target text will be made and the mismatches will be sorted out. Thirdly, the target text will be categorized as overt translation or covert translation according to the matching degree and the translation quality of the target text will be evaluated.Through analysis, it is concluded that the English version of Brothers matches the source text pretty well on all the eight dimensions, therefore the English version of Brothers is overt translation and is of high quality and House’s model is applicable in assessing the Chinese-English translation of Chinese full-length novels. In the future researches, House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model may also be applied in assessing the translation quality of more other literary genres. However, this model still has space for improvement, for instance, the parameters are not suitably set and the procedures of assessment are complicated so that the whole assessment takes a lot of time. |
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