An Assessment Of Translation Of The Economist Based On Argumentation-Centered Translation Quality Assessment

The paper selects argumentation-centered translation quality assessment proposed by Malcolm Williams to evaluate the source text and the translated text of the Economist.Williams adopts Toulmin's theory,which argues that the argument of one text is the core to evaluate,and he also introduces the theory of rhetorical topology,which completes his theory structure.Meanwhile,Williams sets up parameters for evaluation and assigns them,moreover,he proposes translation quality standard,which provides actual basis for the evaluators.The paper uses argumentation-centered translation quality assessment as the tool to evaluate the articles in the Economist.The paper perfects the assessment in terms of parameters and scoring standards,firstly,based on the features of the Economist,the paper confirms the field/use –specific parameters: proper noun,target-language and format,and uses the method of analytic hierarchy process to assign the parameters(except argument schema);secondly,the paper sets up the scoring standards.The paper then uses the argumentation-centered assessment to evaluate six articles randomly selected from the Economist,and then represents the results in the form of chart.Through the analysis of the evaluating results,the conclusions are as follows: firstly,the argumentation-centered assessment proposed by Williams has a general guiding significance towards the instrumental translation of English to Chinese while the evaluators need to adopt the assessment tools based on different purposes and styles;secondly,the tools for assigning the parameters and the specific scoring standards should be unified so as to guarantee the validity of the results;lastly,the evaluator should pay attention to the field/use –specific parameters.