Application Of J.House's TQA Model In The Quality Assessment Of Legal Text Translation

Implementing a quality assessment on translation texts can assess translators' proficiency,and improve the capability of translation practice.Therefore,translation quality assessment owns a great significance.Through literature review,author finds out that many studies on translation quality assessment focus on legal language,culture and social background factors.Scholars also present various translation theories to guide translation practices.However,few researches are devoted to the translation quality assessment,or the quality assessment of ESP(English for Special Purposes)translation.In this thesis,German translator Juliane House's Translation Quality Assessment Model is chosen as research object to study its applicability on the translation quality assessment of Chinese legal documents from Chinese to English.House's TQA Model adopts Halliday's functional linguistics as its theoretical foundation.Researchers could give comments on the quality of translation by assessing the conformity of functions under genre and register of ST and TT.House's TQA model is called as “the first quality assessment model of translation ever with complete theory and practice among the international translation critics”(Si Xianzhu,2005).Few applications of House's TQA Model were devoted to the quality assessment of legal texts between Chinese and English so far.In this research,Guiding Case No.78 of the Supreme People's Court and its two English versions,translated texts from Stanford University Chinese Guiding Case Project(CGCP)and Peking University Law info.(PUL)are selected as the research materials.Guiding Case No.78 is chosen as an example of legal texts in this thesis.A comparative analysis is adopted as the research methodology to compare and analyse the quality of two versions,to study whether House's TQA Model can be applied in the assessment of legal translation by analysing and comparing TTs.Furthermore,comments will be presented on the applicability of TQA model in the field of legal translation quality assessment.Conclusion:After compared and analysed,CGCP's version enjoys high equivalence on functions under House's TQA Model.PUL's version contains more deviations compared with CGCP's version.More mismatches have been found in PUL's version.CGCP's translation of Guiding Case No.78 could be regarded as a comparatively qualified translation.House's TQA Model can be deemed as a valid model assessing the quality of Chinese legal judgements between Chinese and English,because it can effectively assess the quality of translated texts.However,drawbacks have been found as well.This model still needs further improvement.