Quality assessment for the translation of museum texts: application of a systemic functional model

This article seeks to explore the way in which the notions of 'systemic' and 'functional' can better serve for the application of a translation quality assessment (TQA) model to the studies on the translation of museum texts. Grounded in the theoretical integration of translation studies and museum studies, the present research has shown through the redesign of the assessment procedure for the model that the judgment of the translation quality requires empirical analyses based upon both interlingual and intertextual comparison. Our objective is twofold. First, through investigating the notions such as 'quality', 'assessment' and 'systemic' in their own right, we are able to observe the weaknesses that previous models have. Second, we intend the model proposed here to be taken as a part of the effort to rethink the relationship between bilingual texts displayed in a museum environment, or in an online museum.