Application Of J.House Translation Quality Assessment Model In Business Contract Translation

China’s WTO accession flourishes international trades. Business contract translations of high quality are the basic guarantee for rights of contract parties. However, the translation quality is uneven with the increase in translation activities of business contract so that it is extremely urgent to strengthen the research of assessing business contract translation quality. The development of translation criticism and establishment of the scientific criticism model would be beneficial to improve the quality of translation. Many scholars devoted themselves to the study of translation criticism both at home and abroad, such as Reiss, Wilss, Fan Shouyi, Wu Xinxiang, Li Hongan and Xu Junwen. Among those scholars, German translation theorist Juliane House introduced her model for translation quality assessment which has been considered as the first and one of the few complete systems based on scientific theories and translation practice (Si Xianzhu,2005). J.House’s model is mainly based on Halliday’s functional and systematic theory. The operation of the model involves initially a detailed analysis of the source text according to a set of situational dimensions so as to highlight text functions which are regarded as the standard to evaluate the translated text.This paper attempts to apply J.House’s TQA model to the evaluation of the quality of business contracts. This thesis begins with an introduction to the theoretical background of TQA and reviews to the previous evaluate translation methods from different perspectives. Then the theoretical framework of House’s TQA model is introduced, which is applied in translating business contracts. Meanwhile text typology is used for assessing the quality of business contract translation and the assessment report is given correspondingly.This thesis ends up with following findings:Being different from the traditional evaluation methods, J.House’s model is formed on the basis of professional theories with a complete parameter system, which is able to be performed in certain procedures, combining quantitative method suitably; at the same time, the actual operation of the model seems to be a little cumbersome which needs to improve in future.The research of translation quality assessment is significant in theories and practices. At a theoretical level, it can broaden and enrich the content of translation studies. As for the practical significance of this research, it is beneficial to improve the quality of the translation as well as TQA.