A Corpus-based Quality Assessment Of English Translation Of Propositional Content In Chinese Legal Rules

The present project is a study on the translation quality assessment(TQA)of the propositional content in Chinese legal rules by means of the corpus linguistic method.By drawing on previous studies on legal translation and translation quality assessment models and other related research achievements and combining the features of legal English,legal speech acts and equivalence strategy in legal translation,a new TQA model is proposed,which is intended to be employed for the assessment of a legal text from two perspectives: propositional content and legal effect.The proposed TQA model comprises five parameters,which are information,terminology,syntactic structure,legal force and legal intent,with each then divided into three levels so that the chosen legal text can be classified into three grades according to the final total assessment score.The data collected for this study are thirty legislative texts from the official website of the Standing Committee of People’s Congress of Hubei Province.With the help of the corpus tool Antconc,the target conjunctions and propositional clauses can thus be retrieved and tagged,which are then selected for analysis.To test the feasibility of the proposed TQA model,a pilot study has been conducted as the preliminary test,and then a comprehensive analysis of all selected propositional content is conducted,and with a final case study,the feasibility of the proposed TQA model is well proved.The present study is both theoretically and practically significant.Theoretically,it has combined both speech act theory in pragmatics and static equivalence theory in translation.The data collection is based on the methodology of corpus linguistics.Practically,it is found that various problems in the selected legal texts are found in both propositional content and legal effects,such as omission and mistranslation of the terminologies.The assessment results of the selected legal texts demonstrate the urgency to standardize the current translation market and an effective TQA model can truly serve as a guideline for legal translation.It is also hoped that the research results of the present project can shed some light on future studies of the TQA model for legal translation and may also benefit studies in other related areas.