On Feasibility Of Reiss’ S Translation Criticism In Assessing The Quality Of English Translation Of Ethnic Epics

Reiss was one of the scholars who initiated the research on translation quality assessment.After gaining experience in translating from English,Spanish,French and other languages,she published her book Translation Criticism: The Potentials and Limitations,which opened up a new topic on translation criticism.Her theory provides three categories,involving thirteen criteria for translation quality assessment.In the domestic and foreign studies,the theory has been applied to the quality assessment of long novels,and the validity of the model has been confirmed.However,it is seldom seen in the evaluation of the English translation of ethnic epics.To this end,this thesis attempts to apply its model to assess the English translation of the long narrative epic of the Zhuang people----The Epic of Baeuqloxgdoh.This thesis first determines the text type of the original text,then evaluates the quality of the target text by linguistic and extra-linguistic components,so as to verify the feasibility and validity of Reiss’ s theory.The study found that Reiss’ s assessment criteria are overwhelmingly applicable to the quality assessment of the English translation of The Epic.First,the text type makes the translation quality assessment more targeted.Second,most of the criteria have high validity.However,the time factor and speaker factor are not applicable to the quality assessment of The Epic.Furthermore,Reiss ignores the interaction between linguistic and extra-linguistic components.Meanwhile,Reiss’ s theory for judging the quality of the translation is too vague and lack data support.To address these limitations,this thesis integrates and ranks Reiss’ s critical criteria,assigns values to these criteria,tests the quality of the translation by drawing on the calculation method of comprehensive error rate,and confirms the validity of this method.This thesis synthesizes the Reiss model and adds some thoughts of the authors of this thesis,hence making contributions to the refinement of this model.