The Value Of Register Theory For Translation Quality Assessment And E-C Translation Teaching

Generally speaking, translation refers to the cross-lingual information transference or cross-cultural communication. It is concerned with two relevant language systems, and a lot of issues beyond language. In spite of many limitations, translation remains necessary and valuable. It has brought and continues to bring people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds closer together; it has built bridges of understanding and appreciation among different societies. Even the most skeptical of critics cannot but admit that, if it were not for translators and interpreters, we would be living in a far less friendly and less interesting environment Though the demand of high-quality translators is soaring, translation teaching in most comprehensive universities in China is of low-investment and of low productivity. This is largely attributed to the laggard translation teaching, which has not absorbed the achievements of the modern linguistics until now.Translation study is a young discipline, which needs to draw on the findings and theories of other related disciplines in order to develop and formalize its own methods. It is widely accepted that linguistics has a great deal to offer to the budding discipline of translation studies as it is a discipline that studies language both in its own right and as a tool for generating meanings. This is particularly true of modern linguistics, especially text-linguistics (the study of text as a communicative event rather than a shapeless string of words and structures) and pragmatics (the study of language in use rather than language as an abstract system), which no longer restrict themselves to the study of language per se, but rather relates to the world around and to other disciplines as well as to the communicative function of the language. (Mona Baker, 1991)Text linguistics operates translation procedure as a top-down process, i.e. it starts with the text as situated in its context of culture. As Snell-Hornby (1988:69)suggests that 'textual analysis, which is an essential preliminary to translation, should proceed from the "top down", from the macro to micro level, from text to sign', and Hatim and Mason's model of the translation process (1990) also adopts a top-down approach, taking context as starting points for discussing translation problems and strategies.The study on context has been going on for a long time. Among the models of the context study, the register theory developed by the founder of systemic Functional Grammar, Halliday, is the most effective in linguistic analysis. It relates language to situation, in which language is used socially. Thus, it is able to interpret the relationship between grammatical structure and meaning. Its major points of view are summarized as follows: Register refers to a variety of language determined by a particular set of values of the context; it is determined by what the speaker is doing socially. The principal controlling variables are the field of discourse (type of social action), the tenor of discourse (role relationships between speaker and listener) and the mode of discourse (symbolic organization). The three variables (field, tenor, mode) are realized respectively in the ideational meaning, the interpersonal meaning and the textual meaning of language.Register analysis of linguistic texts, which enables us to uncover how language is maneuvered to make meaning, has received popular application in (critical) discourse analysis and (foreign) language teaching pedagogy. The theory is especially useful in the English-Chinese translation teaching; for it can be applied to help to overcome the traditional translation habits on a word or sentence level and so on which hinder the process of translation as a text in contextThis paper addresses the need for a linguistic approach to training in translation studies by drawing on the register theory and relating it systematically to translation. It explores the application of the register theory to translation quality assessment and the English-Chinese translation teaching for English m...