J.House’s Model For Translation Quality Assessment And Its Application In The Economist Translation From English Into Chinese

Translation quality assessment is of principal importance in translation study.How to evaluate the quality of a translated text is not only the prerequisite to the sound development of translation theory,but also the guidance for translators to improve translation skills in practice.Furthermore,a reliable and objective judgement is what all translators like to see.Therefore,the author decided to apply the model for translation quality assessment proposed by a German scholar,Juliane House,to assess the texts selected from Economist（经济学人）.This thesis will give an elaborate introduction to her model’s theoretical foundation,framework,parameters and details of two revisions before its application.Texts involved in this study were selected from the Economist（经济学人）.Within this model,evaluators are required to analyze the linguistic features of both the source texts and the target texts as of their Field,Tenor and Mode,summarizing the functions of the originals.Then they need to list mismatches between the ST and the TT and to evaluate whether they are equivalent in functions,which is the core principle for House’s model.Given this research,it was discovered that along Filed,the translations basically preserve the main content of their originals,but are abundant with emotionally connotated words that weaken the credibility of news discourses.In addition,word-forword translation is a major flaw to the performance of ideational function as it leads to a multitude of expressions against the actual use of Chinese.However,using Chinese four-character words and idioms is a good way to communicate with the target audiences.Along Tenor,due to part inaccurate language equivalents,the translations are less objective than their originals but still professional.They are also featured with colloquial style like short sentences and enjoy a closer relationship with audiences.Along Mode,the translations are loosely structured and less cohesive.For the reason of the well-recognized differences between Chinese and English,it is believed by the author that translators made adjustments to the source texts in aspects like sentence order,subject and voice to ensure the smooth flow of the translation and an equivalent ideational function.But this has a drawback of causing the translations less coherent considering the whole text.This study also serves as a strong evidence to the disparate Chinese and English.Furthermore,the empirical work reveals the model’s complexity in operation for plenty of parameters,some of them overlap.Nevertheless,this model is superior in having a variety of theoretical foundations,a complete framework and an equal emphasis on the ST and the TT.With the analysis over the lexical,syntactic and textual features,evaluators are able to catch the gist of the texts and make rational judgement.