Construction Of The Quality Assessment Model Of Legislative Text Translation From The Functional Linguistics Perspective

Although legislative text translation is showing increasingly importance, its translation quality is far from satisfaction in China. To solve this problem, perhaps one of solutions is to construct a model capable of assessing, and guiding the improvement of, legislative text translation quality. So far, however, studies on translation quality assessment has mainly centered on non-legal texts, and the majority of scholars on legislative text translation have evaded their efforts to construct a cogent and operable model to assess legislative text translation quality, which can probably be explained by a fact that constructing such a model demands the support of a cogent and systematic theory.This study is intended to construct such a model. Based on the principle of functional equivalence of text, the model constructed mainly employs the observational research of contrastive nature, and conducts to some extent quantitative analysis of data when it is applied to genuine legislative text.In order to construct such a model, this present thesis proposes two research questions:1. Based on the relevant theory of the systematic functional linguistics, what are the main contextual factors affecting legislative text translation?2. What are the core parameters of the assessment model and what are the necessary procedures for implementation of the model of TQA of LTT?Through investigation, this thesis has acquired the following major findings:1) by analysis of linguistic features of legislative texts, this thesis establishes "key legislative words" as one of parameters to assess the realization of the ideational functions for a legislative text because the relevant investigation shows that identified legislative concepts and terms directly influences the communication of legislative text;2) for the purpose of assessing the realization of interpersonal function of a legislative text, this thesis, based on the investigation of linguistic features of legislative texts, focuses on mainly declarative sentence, the present tense, the third person and impersonal pronouns, and sets as parameters the finite modal operators and adjuncts of mood;3) although the precedent literatures on translation quality assessment did not incorporate "textual function" into a dimension when assessing text equivalence, the present research holds, based on the investigation of features of legislative texts, that the macro structure of a legislative text remarkably embodies the textual function in terms of macro-logical-semantic relevance of a legislative text, and even the linguistic format and arrangement within a legal clause directly influence the effective understanding and application of the legislative text. For this reason, it is preferable to take them into account, and therefore the present research incorporates the macro structure of a legislative text into top-down register-analysis, and combines the linguistic format and arrangement within a legal clause with the logical-semantic relationship within legal clauses in order to assess the ideational function of a legislative text;4) the thesis not only tests the efficiency of the constructed assessment model based on a case study, but also summarizes the discrepancies of the realization of ideational and interpersonal functions between the source and target legislative texts, which makes contribution to further improve the operability of the assessment model.This thesis tentatively launched a probe to place translation quality assessment of legislative texts on relatively systematic and full-fledged theoretical underpinnings and tested the efficiency of the assessment model. However, to probe the model of assessment of legislative text translation quality is far from in-depth both in theory and practice.