Application of Halliday’s Register Model to Construction of Translation Quality Assessment Criteria in Translation Teaching Context

Abstract

Translation quality assessment (TQA) is an essential link between translation theory and its practice, it is also an enjoyable and instructive exercise, particularly if you are assessing someone else’s translated version or, even better, two or more translated renditions of the same text. Recently, in translation teaching context, translation assessments, conducted by teachers or even students, have appeared unsystematically and mainly based on a vast of subjective deduction or personal experiences; therefore the assessment activity in classrooms is limited in searching for translation errors or mistakes only and the learners also conduct translation exercises without any apparently-standardized criteria given in advance. This paper will present an empirical research on assessment activity through the application of Halliday’s register model, applied to language- majored students’ translation assessment at a university in Vietnam, specifically at Faculty of Foreign Languages of Nha Trang University. To investigate the difference between the two selected groups of students, a survey on students’ TQA activity will be conducted. The purposes of this survey are to see how the students carry out peer assessment activity and to measure to what extent the TQA activity also affects students’ translation competence. To collect the data for the investigation, one group is instructed TQA criteria while the other are not introduced to the TQA criteria. The two selected groups also undertake the assessment activity of the same translated version. The results of this research will show the benefits of constructed criteria for TQA in learning and teaching translation at tertiary level.