A Study On The Translation Quality Assessment Of Two English Versions Of Medicine From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Approach

Based on Si Xianzhu’s translation quality assessment model(TQA),the thesis uses qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze how the two English versions of Medicine deviate from the source text in ideational and interpersonal meaning.According to the definition of deviation proposed by Si Xianzhu,deviation includes positive deviation,negative deviation,and negative equivalence.Positive deviation has a positive effect on translation quality while negative deviation and negative equivalence harm the translation quality.The analysis results show that although the two English versions are mostly equivalent to the source text in terms of ideational and interpersonal meaning,there are still some deviations.This study manually annotates the corpus concerning the transitivity process and mood.In terms of modality and appraisal resources,this study uses UAM Corpus Tool to annotate the corpus.The major findings are listed as follows:In terms of ideational meaning,the two English versions(Yang’s version: TT1 and Lyell’s version: TT2)produce positive deviations in different ways.TT1 tends to contract and alter processes while TT2 is inclined to expand and alter processes.The altering process is due to the difference in participants.The reason for contracting process is some verbal processes are translated into phrases.The reason for expanding the process is the detailed explanation of culture-loaded words.However,both TT1 and TT2 generate negative deviation in various ways.TT1 tends to contract and alter the process and TT2 prefers to expand the process.Contracting process without any change of other forms leads to the loss of original information.Altering process results in the inaccurate conveyance of the contextual meaning of the text.Expansion of process gives rise to the redundancy of expression.The negative equivalence in TT1 and TT2 are both caused by inaccurate conveyance of contextual meaning of the verbal processes embedded in the source text.In terms of interpersonal meaning,the two English versions produce positive and negative deviations in the way of grammatical metaphor but the concrete realizations are different about mood.For positive deviation,TT1 usually changed interrogatives into declaratives and TT2 tended to turn imperatives into interrogatives.For negative deviation,TT2 altered imperatives into declaratives,and there are no negative deviations in TT1.The negative equivalences in TT1 and TT2 are caused by various reasons.Usually,TT1 produces negative equivalence by adding and omitting personal pronouns while TT2 engenders negative equivalence by adding personal pronouns and adopting grammatical metaphor,which weakens the original tone.With regard to modality,both TT1 and TT2 engender positive deviations by using some degree words,phrasal verbs implying modal meaning or modal words whose modal meaning is implicated in the source text.The two versions produce negative deviations in that the modal words used in target texts are endowed with different modal values from the source text and change possibility in the source text.There is no negative equivalence concerning modality in TT1 and TT2.With regard to appraisal resources,TT1 and TT2 generate positive deviations by over-value translation,which can better express potential emotional force in the source text.TT1 uses appraisal resources with weaker emotional force than source text,resulting in negative deviations and TT2 has no negative deviations concerning appraisal resources.Both TT1 and TT2 produce negative equivalences in the way of under-value translation,which softens the emotional intensity in the source text.Besides,TT2 adopts over-value translation,reinforcing the intensity of affect but failing to correspond with original intensity of affect in the source text.Meanwhile,TT2 bears the different language styles from the source text,which produces negative equivalence.Based on the analysis above and relevant data,it is found that the total number of negative deviations and negative equivalences in TT1 is greater than that in TT2,and the total number of positive deviations in TT2 is greater than that in TT1.From this point of view,the translation of TT2 seems to be more faithful to the source text.