Uality Assessment Of Chinese-English Translation Of Political Speeches:a Case Study

Working within Systemic Functional Grammar (SFL), Si (2007) proposes a complete TQA (TQA) model based on Chinese and English (C-E) written discourse, but he did not apply this model to different discourse types to test its feasibility. The present study is an attempt to take a political speech and its translation as a case to test the feasibility of Si’s TQA model for assessing the quality of C-E political speeches, with the aim to make it more applicable. The political speech is chosen because it is a compound discourse type, according to Reiss’s (1989) text-typology, which has the dominant function of both ideational and interpersonal meaning, and thus to realize functional equivalence is important in its translation.A case study is made of President Xi’s inaugural speech Interpretation of China Dreams and its translation.Aided by UAM Corpus Tool, data were coded in analysis of the ideational and interpersonal choices, such as transitivity, speech function, mood type, modality, subject person and appraisal choices, to observe whether there is deviation and negative equivalence and whether the translated text (TT) realizes functional equivalence with the source text (ST), as well as to improve the parameters and processes of Si’s TQA model. The results show that ST mainly utilizes ideational resources such as material process to interpret the China dream and interpersonal resources such as Subject person and positive attitude resources to call on people to realize this dream. TT gives appropriate translation but it still has some deviations and negative equivalences, and the problem in interpersonal meaning is more prominent (two deviations and six negative equivalences in ideational meaning, and11deviations in interpersonal meaning). This demonstrates that Si’s TQA model is basically applicable to assess the quality of C-E political speeches. If the following adjustments can be made, the better effect of assessment will be achieved. First, the parameters and processes of Si’s model are realized by lexico-grammatical system at the clausal level, which is comparatively complex and time-consuming. It’s advisable to compare the prominent features that convey the interpersonal and ideational meaning between ST and TT. Second, due to the fact that the political speech is a compound discourse type in which both the ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning are of same importance, there is no need to set the weight of different meanings when assessing its holistic translation quality.This study makes Si’s TQA model more applicable for assessing quality of C-E political speeches and also contributes to the translation of Chinese political speeches.