A Report On The Translation Of Narrative Of Sojourner Truth With The Approach Of J.House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model

This thesis is a report on the translation of Narrative of Sojourner Truth,which falls into the category of biography text with informative,expressive and sometimes operative functions.Therefore both "faithfulness" and "expressiveness" should be taken as translation principles in biography translation.This translation report makes a detailed description of the translation practice of this project under the guidance of Julian House’s translation quality assessment model.First,the source text profile is analyzed from perspectives of Register and Genre,based on which a function statement of the source text is made;Second,the translation type of the target text is determined according to the function statement of ST,which should be an overt translation overall,and the text’s function at secondary-level is decided with the approach of topicalization of the original function of ST;Third,taking the textual function of the target language as the prerequisite and ideational and interpersonal functional equivalence at secondary-level as the translation principle,the translator identified translation key points such as translation of expressions with religious meaning,translation of appraisal attributes and modal particles,and the connectivity of TT,and strategies such as use of annotations and Chinese four-character structures and omissions of references are adopted to solve problems encountered in the process of translation;Finally,with mismatches listed based on the comparison between ST and draft TT,self-revision is made to improve the quality of the final translation.Based on translation practice,the practical value of House’s model in guiding biography translation is proved in this project and a well-grounded conclusion could be generated as follows:In light of the combination of historical and literary value in biography texts,the core idea of ideational and interpersonal functional equivalence in House’s model could largely help the translator to maintain the factual meaning and literary features of the source text.To sum up,House’ TQA model could be a highly effective tool to help to achieve semantic and pragmatic equivalence between source texts and target texts in biography translation.