Translation Quality Assessment Of Contract

With the development of the global economy and the further deepening of China's open policy, contract translation has been of more and more importance. Contract as a type of legal document is the legal insurance of smooth trading. Since English is universally accepted as a commercial language, it is a usual practice in our foreign trade to contract in the English language. Therefore, high translation quality of contract plays a vital role in safeguarding and performing the parties' respective rights and obligations.As for the study of contract translation, many scholars home and abroad have been delving into this. However, these studies are only confined to the level of lexis and syntax; the study of text type of contract, in another word, text style, is not common, and the study of translation quality of contract is even less or rare.J. House's translation quality assessment (TQA) model, drawing on the knowledge of other linguistic schools, is mainly based on Halliday's systemic-functional theory. This model provides us with a comparatively objective model for evaluating translation quality, though not without its defect. It mainly includes three layers: text, situation and culture. Employing House's model and absorbing its invaluable parts, especially considering contract as a highly codified text linguistically and in form, this author boldly established a translation quality assessment model specific to contract, in hoping that it can provide some instructions for translating contract and arouse interests of other scholars in establishing TQA models for other text types.This thesis includes five chapters:Chapter One first reports on three different approaches to translation evaluation which emanate from different concepts of "meaning" and its role in translation.Chapter Two introduces J. House's functional-pragmatic approach to evaluating translation quality. First, her original model and revisited model are presented and some basic concepts related to House's model are also introduced. Then it differentiates the linguistic description and social evaluation and also makes the difference between different types of translation and translation versions. Last, comments on the strong point(?) and weaknesses are presented.Chapter Three elaborates the importance of text and text type in translation and translation evaluation. This chapter also explains the reason that the introduction of text type in translating contract doesn't contradict with genre in House's model. The relationships between register, text type and genre are closely related and inseparable.Chapter Four is "the survey of contract". In this chapter, the definition of contract is first presented; also, the cultural and situational contexts of contract are analyzed. Contract as a type of legal document is conventionalized with common expectation and norm in terms of lexis, syntax and form. As a conclusion and based on the above analysis, this author argues that the function of contract is prescribed.Chapter Five points out that one important presupposition of House's TQA model is that the function of original text is unknown, which must be identified through analysis of the original's register (Field, Tenor and Mode). In this way, the meta-function of the original can be attained. As in the above analysis, since the function (interpersonal and textual) of contract is prescribed, the analysis of Tenor and Mode of the original can be omitted in practical evaluating process. Consequently, the procedures of evaluating can be greatly reduced. On the basis of the previous chapters, this author boldly proposes a translation quality assessment model specific to contract. A test case is presented at the end of this chapter.