The Translation Principles And Strategies Of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone On House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model

Translation quality assessment (TQA for short) means evaluation of translation activities, its process and value of result according to certain standards. Translation quality assessment is a new branch of translation under translation criticism, which links translation theory with practice. So far, there are a lot of scholars who have studied translation quality assessment and put forward different evaluation pattern. Of them the most known are Reiss, House and Williams. Reiss’s innovation lies in the fact that she expands word and sentence level to text level in translation quality assessment mode, and the deficiency is that Reiss only thinks about the factor of language in evaluation and doesn’t put forth a systematic evaluation mode. It is Williams who first put forward the argument model on translation quality assessment and the lowest standard of quality. However, there is no fixity in the parameter set on his evaluation model. On the basis of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, House presented her translation quality assessment pattern both macroscopically and microscopically, and therefore it was considered to be the most systemic. However, it is far from enough for the study of translation quality assessment both at home and abroad, especially in China, the research on translation quality assessment mostly focuses on analysis of foreign pattern. So we need have a further study in this field. This article aims to study how House’s pattern applies to children’s novel.When House put forward her translation quality assessment pattern, she had verified that it could apply to autobiography, philosophical essays, history texts and books for children. Later, a lot of researchers verified that her pattern was applicable to ads, prose and poems of Song Dynasty. When analyzing applicability of House’s pattern to books for children, first of all, I compare source texts with target texts from register (register includes three variables:field, tenor and mode) and style so that I can make their framework of textual functions respectively. Secondly, I make the contrast of source texts with target texts to analyze how they match. At last, I give an account of results of the assessment. This paper will mainly make an assessment of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by Ma Ainong and Cao Suling from tenor because House’s mode can prove that it applies to books for children from more microcosmic angle.This paper makes studies on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone translated by Ma Ainong and Cao Suling. By drawing a comparison between original English version and Chinese version by People’s Literature Publishing House, I arrive at a conclusion that the translation quality of Chinese version is of high quality, which proves House’s mode can be used to assess the translation quality of English-Chinese novels, too.