An Assessment Of Three English Versions Of Bid Invitation And Bidding Law Of PRC In Accordance With A TQA Model Under SFG

In the past two or three decades, China has witnessed a soaring economy andsocial developments, which has facilitated the interactions between China and foreigncountries. During such interactions, legal translation is catching more attention, and isflourishing now. Although the legal translation and translation quality have come intoexistence much earlier in China, systematic researches on the legal translation ortranslation quality in the said area were rather recent. The qualities of currenttranslation products are really far from being satisfactory. Therefore, a proper qualityevaluation or assessment of such translations is essential.To evaluate or assess the translation quality objectively and accurately, theconstruction of translation quality assessment model is one of the important solutions.Juliane House might be the first linguist who has established translation qualityassessment model systematically. However, the complicated and overlappingparameters in her model have long been argued or debated. In light of these, Chinesescholar Si Xianzhu has improved the model, and has tried to apply his improvedmodel to the analysis of various texts. However, this improved model has seldombeen applied to evaluate the translation quality of laws and regulations. When itcomes to the translation quality assessment model, as different translation skills andtheories might be applied to the different source texts, the quality assessment modelsfor different translation products can not be totally invariable.Therefore, based on the Systemic Functional Grammar of M. A. K. Halliday andwell-established translation quality assessment models, the author of the presentendeavor has constructed a quality assessment model for the specialized analysis oftranslations of laws and regulations, and applies this model to the assessment of partof three English versions of Bid Invitation and Bidding Law of PRC. Taking threemetafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar as analytical parameters, the authorof this study makes a comparative study of the corresponding sections of bothChinese source text and three English versions, and has calculated the specificdeviations in each English version. After the author has classified the deviations andreanalyzed them, she has distinguished the positive deviations from the negative ones,and summed up the final achievement by making use of the translation qualityassessment model. In the course of the assessment, this study maintains that the translations of Terms of Art are very crucial, so it is necessary to put the discussion ofthem at the beginning of an assessment. Besides, the non-deviations are definitely notthe best equivalence between source text and target text. The assessment result is notan absolute dichotomy, the translation quality should be assessed objectively.Therefore, both the merits and demerits of each translation product have beenmentioned in the assessment summary. Through the quality analysis of48successivearticles of three English versions, the author has made a relatively accurate andobjective assessment of the translation quality, and testified the feasibility of makingtranslation quality assessment through her newly constructed model, so as to offersome guidance for the future like studies.