The Purposiveness Principle in Translation Evaluation

¹ School of Humanities and Arts, Hunan Institute of Traffic Engineering, Hengyang, Hunan, China
² Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China

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Abstract

In recent years, the evaluation of translation quality has been widely commented upon in the domestic translation community, with numerous theoretical achievements. However, the author holds that rather than theory, it should be more of practice, in which the practical purposes of translation are involved. The purposes can be roughly classified into two: content-oriented translation and translation for overall appreciation. Different translation purposes should have different evaluation characteristics. In general, there are unified standards for the former; but for the latter, there appear widely accepted distinctions of merits and demerits, and also being complex and not absolutized. This paper, in the light of the purposive evaluation principle, typically discusses the respective evaluation in practice via translation examples.