A Study Of Translation Quality Assessment Model For Political Speech

Translation criticism comes into being with the appearance of translation. In recentyears,translation quality assessment as the practical activity of translation criticism hasaroused great interest of scholars in the field of translation. In China, when translation qualityassessment is mentioned, Professor Si Xianzhu is considered as a pioneer for he proposes ascientific and operative translation quality assessment model. But there is still deficiency inProfessor Si Xianzhu's model such as the lack of case analysis for public speech. Politicalspeech as one kind of public speech has to be translated into target language for convenienceof communication, so its translation quality determines whether the communication issuccessful or not. Thereby, this thesis tries to test the feasibility of Si Xianzhu's translationquality assessment model for political speech by means of case analysis.This thesis is designed to answer two questions: (1) what defects are there in SiXianzhu's TQA model for political speech? (2) What modifications can be made on ProfessorSi Xianzhu's TQA model to make it more applicable for assessing political speech translation?In order to answer the above questions, two sample speeches are downloaded by the authorfrom the Internet including both American President Obama's English-Chinese speech andChinese Premier Wen Jiabao's Chinese-English speech. By applying Professor Si Xianzhu'stranslation quality assessment model, this thesis does case analysis on the two samples bothqualitatively and quantitatively.After the case analysis, the following conclusions can be easily made that Professor SiXianzhu's translation quality assessment model is applicable to political speech, but there arestill two defects. The first defect is that there is no theory to guide the assessor to discover anddescribe deviations in step two of his model, and the original way of discovering deviationsbased on personal feeling is somewhat subjective and unreliable; the second defect is aboutthe final translation quality assessment, and the original assessment makes people feel that it istoo general or say there is no assessment at all. So for the two defects, this thesis introducestwo theories of translation shifts and hierarchy of translation quality, and at last it gives amodified translation quality model for political speech.