PACTE's Translation Competence Model And Translation Quality Assessment

Rudyard Kipling was the first and youngest person to win the Nobel Prize for literature in England.During his lifetime,he wrote 4 novels,8 poetry collections,21 collections of short stories and historical stories,as well as a large number of notes and essays.Captains Courageous,one of Kipling's representative works,written in the heyday of his creation,depicts a spoiled and rich boy who goes through hardships and finally becomes a hard-working and brave man on his own.Immediately after this novel was published,it was widely liked by young readers.As spiritual food for teenagers all over the world,it is now on the lists of the world's classic literature.This novel has also played a great role in education of the teenagers in our country.Drawing on the sub-competences of PACTE's Translation Competence Model,this thesis conducts a comparative study on the three Chinese versions of Captains Courageous,namely,Hou Minggu and Hu Chunlan's version,Xu Pu and Wang Chengzhang's version and Wu Gang's version.Through comparison and analysis,this thesis mainly studies the typical errors in literary translation and digs out their causes—the lack of translation competences.The first chapter introduces the purpose and significance of the research,research methodology and questions as well as the structure of this thesis.Chapter two mainly reviews the researches on translation quality assessment models,the translation of Captains Courageous and translation competence.Chapter three is the theoretical framework of this thesis— PACTE's Translation Competence Model,and its application.The fourth chapter does a brief introduction to Captains Courageous and the selected three Chinese translations of this novel,and then comparatively analyzes the errors of the selected versions and the shortage of translation competences based on PACTE's Translation Competence Model.Chapter five is the conclusion.The present author finds Wu Gang's translation is of the highest quality among these three versions,followed by Hou Minggu and Hu Chunlan's version.Xu Pu and Wang Chengzhang's version is of the lowest quality among these three versions.The lack of translation sub-competences mainly centers on that of instrumental sub-competence and knowledge about translation sub-competence.This thesis applies PACTE's Translation Competence Model into the analysis of the reasons for translation errors and,it reveals that translators' competence is the determining factor of translation quality.This study will provide references for the training of professional translators and in turn improve translators' competences and translation quality.