A Study On Discourse Construction Of The Assessor Role In Translation Assessment In Cyberspace

With the innovation of media technology and the interactive communication of network platform,digital media has brought great changes to information searching,information spreading and information assessment.The development of digital technology has given a new prominence to the role of translation receivers.Thus,online translation assessment is produced of itself.For online translations,any person who has access to the network(whether he is professional in translation studies and practice,or a translation amateur or even a web viewer)is likely to act as an "assessor" to evaluate on the quality or preferences of online translation works in different ways of discourse.These comments often appear in the community forum,network post bar,microblog and other occasions.This article explores the ways in which translation assessment is discursively constructed by readers participating in an online translation debate,evaluating the Chinese translation version of Stray Birds,written by Tagore and translated by Feng Tang.it examines how readers participating in a translation debate in Baidu Forum and microblog,enact the “assessor” role in evaluating the translation.Drawing on the concepts of “role theory”,the author argues that online translation assessors perform the discourse roles of “expert-judge”,“activist”and “assessment evaluator”.Generally speaking,discourse analysis includes two kinds of study.One study is the internal structure of discourse,focusing on the syntax and semantics of discourse,and the other study is the external structure of discourse,focusing on pragmatics and cultural factors of discourse.The findings suggest that translation assessment in cyberspace is a subjective,contextualizing process where value,meaning and function are often a matter of uptake.Furthermore,discourse-based approaches may play critical roles in examining translation assessment in cyberspace as a socially situated act that involves an intricate negotiation of meaning,complex working of power and a reconstitution of local social positioning within global cultural flows.