Construction Of An Ot-Based Translation Quality Assessment

Translation studies has been an independent discipline with obvious interdisciplinary features, whose theoretical bases has benefited a lot from such disciplines as linguistics, philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. And as an important component of translation studies, Translation Quality Assessment gradually shows its interdisciplinary properties.In retrospect of the Chinese-English translation history before 1970s, Translation Quality Assessment has never been regarded as a dependent study. Most theorists present long dissertations about the translation criteria and just make digressive allusions about the Translation Quality Assessment. Obviously, with the highly-developed translation theories and practice nowadays, the conditional long-scattered and subjective views and methods of Translation Quality Assessment are far from meeting the needs of the translation studies. The pursuit of an efficient, straightforward and scientific assessment method becomes more and more imperious.Optimality Theory, a salient theory in western linguistic field, brought forward by Prince and Smolensky in 1990s, has attracted much attention both at home and abroad due to its scientificity, efficiency and objectivity. In this paper, the new perspective of OT is adopted to the Translation Quality Assessment, employing scientific linguistic theory and methods. In view of the interactions between OT and translation studies which we should not neglect any longer, this thesis just serves as a pavement for the construction of a more nearly systematic framework of Translation Quality Assessment from the Optimality Theory perspective.This thesis firstly introduces the present study of Translation Quality Assessment, and then attempts to introduce and transplant Optimality Theory into Translation Quality Assessment through the analysis of its feasibility thus to construct a theoretical framework of OT-based Translation Quality Assessment for the purpose of guiding the practice of Translation Quality Assessment. Therefore, the structure of this thesis comes as follows:the first part concentrates on the origin of the present study of Translation Quality Assessment, its theoretical bases, scope of research and significance, and the main contents of the following three chapters. Then, in Chapter 1, the author focuses on the necessity of introducing Optimality Theory into translation studies. Chapter 2 firstly introduces the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory and then puts emphasis on the feasibility of OT perspective in Translation Quality Assessment. In Chapter 3, as the focus of this thesis, the author constructs the theoretical framework of OT-based Translation Quality Assessment through forming a logical model from the low level to the high level, from the generation of components to the construction of the constraints active, then to the generation of the optimal output through the detailed operation of this analytical model, and finally to the application of this model in different genres. The last section is the conclusion which states that a brief review of the previous chapters, states that although the attempt to transplant Optimality Theory into translation is helpful to both translation and the theory itself, for the improvement of the new theory—OT-based Translation Quality Assessment, there have been and will be various problems to handle.In short, the application of Optimality Theory in translation studies must be helpful and inspiring. And there is still much for us to deal with in OT-based Translation Quality Assessment. It is hoped that there will be more participants so that it could further facilitate the development of translation studies as a whole.