Quality Assessment Of The English Versions Of Chinese Legislative Texts: A Legal Discourse Information Analytic Approach

The present study aims to assess the quality of translated versions of one legislative text from the perspective of legal discourse information.To achieve this objective,a translation quality assessment model is worked out on the basis of the genre analysis of legal discourse,with legal discourse information analysis as the analytic tool.Under this model,the differences in meaning and intent of the translated versions in question are first detected and compared and,thereafter,an assessment result can be achieved by tracing back to the source text and adopting the following two criteria: equivalence of legal meaning and equivalence of legal intent.The assessment and comparison are carried out on three levels of information,namely,propositional information,generic information and pragmatic information,with the two models under legal discourse information analysis(Du,2007) as the analytical tool.The analysis reveals that during the translating process,the principle of legal equivalence has to be applied to different levels in which the above three types of information are respectively represented,and any miss or distortion of information in the target text at any level may incur non-equivalence in legal meaning and/or legal intent to the source text and thus fails to realize the informative function.What is more,translators tend to fail in realizing the legal equivalence at higher levels rather than at the level of text.The translation of legislative text still desires improvement with a more comprehensive view.In light of such comparison and assessment,the present study gives a relatively systematic and comprehensive view to the quality assessment of legislative translation by proposing to assess the rendition of information from three perspectives and proves that equivalences in legal meaning and legal intent are acceptable criteria for assessing the informative translation of legislative texts and that the legal discourse information analysis can be adopted as analytical tool to compare different translated versions and understand the source text.The present study may also arouse attention to the improvement of legislative translation.