E-C Translation Quality Assessment Of Runaway Based On House’s Model

Translation plays an important role in information transmission, cultural exchange and interlingual communication between countries with different languages. Not all the translation works, however, are competent of this medium role. Assessing translation quality can on the one hand evaluate and sift versions and on the other hand regularize translating to improve translation quality. Research on translation quality assessment (TQA), which can broaden and enrich studies in the field of translation, is an indispensible part in translatology. Efforts have been made by many translationists and scholars to propose various principles and models for TQA, among which most are, however, summary of experience, being short of solid theoretical basis and concrete operation method, while some others are difficult to be applied in practice because too many complicated parameters are set. As a result, the assessment of translation quality is not always as systematic or objective as expected.The model based on functional linguistics and pragmatics, put forward by a German scholar, Julian House, is widely accepted as the milestone in TQA development history. Having evolved from the original model to the revisited one, it can be seen as a scientific and valid model for TQA. Of course, there are inevitably some demerits, such as overlapping parameters, neglecting the factor of translator and so on. This thesis attempts to modify House’s model with appraisal theory as reference. On the dimension of Tenor, several amendments are made to make up for the demerits. The original parameters are adjusted and combined to avoid overlap and the parameter attitude is added to involve translator’s influence to the translation. This modified model is applied to assess the English-Chinese translation quality of Runaway, a short story written by Alice Munro who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mismatches between source text and target text are revealed by comparing them on levels of Register, which includes Field, Tenor and Mode, Genre and Function of the text. The quality of translation is decided by the number of mismatches. The less the number is, the higher the quality is. After the assessment, it is proved that the Chinese version is qualified, with the function and style of the English text remained in spite of some mismatches in Register. Most of these mismatches, however, are the result of immanent differences between English and Chinese as well as the translator’s choice, which might not necessarily lead to poor translation.In retrospect of previous studies on House’s model of TQA, they are mainly on theoretical aspect rather than empirical one. This thesis concludes some obstacles met in the process of operating House’s model for TQA, hoping to shed light on its future study and development, and appeals to apply House’s model more to the practice of assessing different types of texts, in the process of which parameters can be adjusted and perfected so that the model gets suitable to be more widely used.