Abstract

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.

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