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

The study of translation criticism and the relative models helps perfect translation behaviour, raise the level of translation quality, and provide us with appropriate approaches to build the interlingual transfer mechanics. This thesis introduces comprehensively theoretical bases which J. House's model for translation quality assessment (QA) is formulated, its structure and some basic concepts, and simultaneously discusses its availability in English-Chinese translation practice.The thesis firstly analyses three kinds of approaches to translation QA:anecdotal and subjective approaches, response-oriented approaches, and text-basedapproaches. Anecdotal and subjective approaches focus on the translator and his/herpersonal knowledge, intuitions and artistic competence. Such intuitive treatments ontranslation quality are subjective and atheoretical in nature. Response-orientedapproaches concern about the relationship between translator and reader, and thatbetween the original and the translation. However, some criteria for translationquality assessment, such as three criteria postulated by Nida (general efficiency ofthe communicative process, comprehension of intent, and equivalence of response),prove to be vague and non-verifiable. Text-based approaches are represented bylinguistics, post-modern, comparative literature or functional models. Inlinguistically-based approaches, the proposals of transferring language the proper,text types, and even the procedure of evaluation, are insightfully suggested, but theyremain implicit in depth. Post-modern models break the traditional rules ofassessing. They emphasize the afterlife of the translated texts and invisibility oftranslators, but they cannot distinguish a translation from a text belonging to adifferent textual operation. The comparative literature approaches assess the qualityof a translation according to the system of the target language. They have overcomesome weaknesses of the prescriptive models. However, as for the notion of atranslation and the criteria for evaluating it, their explanations are unclear.Functional models emphasize the 'skopos' of a translation, but the explanation ofsome basic concepts is open to debate.J. House proposes a model based on the functions of texts and pragmatictheories. The operation of the model involves initially an analysis of the original according to a set of situational dimensions, for which linguistic correlates are established. The resulting textual profile of the original characterizes its function, which is then taken as the norm against which a translation is measured; the degree to which the textual profile and function of the translation match the profile and function of the original is the degree to which the translation is adequate in quality. Finally, a qualitative judgment of the translation consists of a listing of two types of errors, i.e. dimensional mismatches (pragmatic errors that have to do with language users and language use) and non-mismatches (those in the denotative meanings of original and translation elements and breaches of the target language system at various levels), and of a statement of the relative match of the two functional components.The paper finally presents a case study to test the availability of J. House's model in the English-Chinese translation practice. The corpus of the test is an English text taken from A New English Course and its translation from a teachers' reference book. The final result is quite satisfactory that an objective, convincing statement can be achieved by applying the model. The model is practical in operation, objective in analyzing the texts and convincing in assessment of quality. However, this model also has some defects reflected in translation teaching. In addition, the actual operation of the model seems to be a little cumbersome.