Translation Quality Assessment Of Two Translations Of My Old Home From The Perspective Of Transitivity

Picking out a high-quality translation among various translations of the same book has always been the concern of both readers and academic researchers. Although translation quality assessment has broken away from a trend of sharing critics’ understandings and casual judgments, it still lacks theoretical supports that have been widely applied in practice. One of the main achievements that functionalist studies in translation have gained is to promote quality assessment of translation works. Among them, the translation quality assessment model for Chinese-English translations constructed by Si Xianzhu has the advantages of objectivity and systematicity in considering Chinese-English translations.Based on Si’s translation quality assessment model, this paper is an attempt to test the applicability of translation quality assessment from the perspective of transitivity. We focus on such a phenomenon that transitivity process shift in the TT is likely to cause ideational meaning deviation in the TT. We choose the short story “The Old Home” by Lu Xun and its two English translations as the corpus. First of all, we classify the transitivity process types of the ST and the TT and take it as a prerequisite for comparing the proportion of transitivity process types in the ST and the TT. We also compare transitivity process pattern of the ST with that of the TT. Lastly, we show deviations in the ideational function caused by process shifts at the sentence level of the TT. Then, we reevaluate those deviations in ideational meanings at the text level. Thus we can see the specific translation quality assessments of the two translations of The Old Home.By comparing the ST and the TT from the perspective of transitivity, we find that both William Lyell’s translation and Julie Lovell’s translation have similar proportion of process type distribution with the original work. This is justifiable for the fact that the ST and the TT essentially have the same Field in text. Secondly, we find that compared with Julie Lovell’s translation, the transitivity process type pattern of William Lyell’s translation is closer to that of the original work. In other words, William Lyell’s translation tends to keep process type in more consistence with the original work. Julie Lovell, for her pursuit for both language style and combination of creativity and vigor, is more likely to change the transitivity process type pattern in the TT. Thirdly, from the perspective of ideational meaning deviations caused by transitivity process shift in the TT, we consider William Lyell’s translation better than Julie Lovell’s.We therefore hold the view that translation quality assessment can be conducted from the perspective of transitivity system in SFL. This will contribute to supplement perspectives for translation quality assessment researches. The thesis shows that keeping transitivity process type in consistence with the ST is less likely to produce ideational meaning deviation in the TT, thus a closer adherence to the original transitivity process type will be more effective in fully representing the ideational functions of the original work and reproducing the language effect of the ST. What is worth noticing is the fact that we cannot thus ask translators to do so, because sometimes following so closely the form of the ST may cloak the sense of the original work and affect the formation of a translator’s own language style.