On The Construction Of Translation Quality Assessment Model-A Cognitive Approach

Translation quality assessment is an important part of translation theory and translation practice. With the development of the translation, translation quality assessment has received more and more people’s attention. Juliane House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model is the most representative. As the first complete and objectivity translation quality assessment model in the history of translation, it based on the framework of systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis and treated sentence, vocabulary and discourse as evaluation unit. It did not comply with the traditional linguistic equivalence and formed the first complete evaluation model which has great significance in the history. But in some extent, House’s model for translation quality assessment has great limitations, especially the parameters setting and the type of text. In our country, the research on translation quality assessment has long history. But comparatively speaking, the studies of the translation quality assessment were only limited to subjective experience summary and did not put forward a complete evaluation model in real sense.Cognitive linguistics proves that the proposition is the basic information processing unit. As a form of information processing, translation can also treat proposition as the basic unit for processing. Therefore, in this paper, the author intends to open a new path and treat cognitive linguistics as the foundation, the propositions as the basic translation unit and the three-step division of translation interpretation in cognitive translation operation mode of Professor Yan Linhai as the basis. The author tends to establish a translation quality assessment model from the perspective of cognition, and takes the designated translation “Limbo” of the fifth session of The World of English translation contest as the example, the translation from “Oxford wit” as analysis object and points out how the operation mode operates step by step.The translation quality assessment model the author formed treats proposition as the basic unit and segments the original and target texts into propositions through propositional segmentation, macro-chained propositions and proposition clausalization. Then it will compare the propositions of the source text and target text. At last, it will point out that it is over translation or under translation by comparing the number of propositions and point out the errors in pragmatic and semantic aspects by comparing the original and target texts from pragmatic and semantic aspects. Eventually, we can get the comprehensive evaluation results by integrating all the aspects.