Translation Quality Assessment Based On The Features Of Conceptual Metaphor Use In Translation

With the rising significance of translation in a globalized epoch,translation quality assessment(TQA)has gradually been pushed under the spotlight.The common approach to evaluate a translation text mainly focuses on linguistic and sociocultural factors.However,another emerging trend which taps into translator’s mind is to regard translation as a cognitive procedure.Adopting a combination of qualitative and quantitative interpretation,this thesis analyses 69 translations of the same source text(ST),but from participants with different levels of translation ability.The ST in this research is derived from English-Chinese(E-C)translation practice at Level II in China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters(CATTI)of 2017.In this study,the Chinese reference translation is used as the ST,and subjects are required to translate the ST into English.We examine the following two interrelated research questions:(1)What are the differences in conceptual metaphors used by different translators in translation?(2)How do we assess translation quality based on the above features of conceptual metaphor use in terms of density and variety?The findings are that the overall metaphoric density increases across the five levels from E to A(from low to high).A low metaphoric density is detected at Level E(9.82%),whereas Level A tops the chart with 20.21%.In addition,the quantitative analysis shows that the densities and accuracy of six indicators including metaphorical phraseology,creative metaphor,pronoun,preposition,and diversity of both entity metaphor and orientational metaphor go up across levels from E to A.In the end,we propose corresponding TQA descriptors for C-E translation practice in CATTI in order to enrich its evaluation criteria.This study differs from previous ones mainly in research questions because there has been no comprehensive study to date on the conceptual metaphor particularly utilized by translators of different levels.Moreover,there are few studies on assessing translation quality based on the features of conceptual metaphor use.As a result,research from this perspective could contribute to a rising focus on conceptual metaphor by not only translators themselves but their instructors.