Assessing the English Translation of BFSU’s New Motto

Zuqiong Ma

doi:10.5539/ijel.v6n6p45

Abstract

<p>The motto is a potent marketing tool in today’s globalized site of higher education. Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) adopted a new motto in 2011 to reflect its new self-branding as a cosmopolitan scholar-doer. Its English translation has since then triggered much discussion about quality assessment. The current study critically surveys the existing literature on translation quality assessment (TQA), in an effort to identify an appropriate framework to assess the translation of Chinese university mottos. House’s model (2015) is found the most appropriate and applied to the official translation of the BFSU motto, after being adjusted in two important aspects. One, in regard to the rise of English as a language of global communication, it is proposed that more broad-based English norms than those of English as a native language be established for the purpose of adjudicating cultural filtering. Two, the use of corpus-based contrastive pragmatics is expanded to gauge the justifiability of overt as well as covert mismatches. While the errors identified by such a modified model are better intersubjectively verifiable, it remains to see how social research can be incorporated into the system to assess the degrees different errors may impact on the perceived quality of a translation.</p>

Highlights

Beginning of the StoryThe motto is a wonderful window to the university’s soul and a potent marketing tool in today’s globalized site of higher education
The motto is a potent marketing tool in today’s globalized site of higher education
Two errors have been identified by using the tailored House’s model, one covert and the other overt. They look reminiscent of the criticisms voiced by Wang as noted at the beginning of the current paper. They are firmly grounded in ST-TT functional-pragmatic analysis and have gained corpus-based intersubjectivity

Summary

Beginning of the Story

The motto is a wonderful window to the university’s soul and a potent marketing tool in today’s globalized site of higher education. More pertinent to the current paper, he found the English translation the least satisfactory, expressing mainly two reservations It consists of two imperative clauses, which come across as blunt directives at BFSU students, but a university motto verbalizes the principle of being for the whole university, including faculty, staff, as well as students, and in all university affairs, academic, administrative, etc. It is hard to see where the latter half of the English rendition “serve a great cause” comes from Not likely from the latter half of the Chinese original “博学笃行”, Wang suspected Wang’s criticism is not easy to dismiss, but it seems rash to discredit the English translation on his arguments alone One may argue his conclusions are either predicated upon an impressionistic (anecdotal) view of the function of university motto (first criticism) or an “outdated” notion of translation as linguistic correspondence ijel.ccsenet.org. How will one argue or counter-argue about the quality of a motto translation less subjectively, more scientifically?

A Theoretical Prequel

Development of the Current Story

Evaluating the English Translation of BFSU’s Motto

Conclusion