Chinese scholarship has had an influx of Western ideas in the last twenty years, notably in connection with "dynamic equivalence". Referring to the fact that translation cannot be evaluated by matching response from target readerships with that of source readerships, the author focuses on "text in communication", then on "the translation situation” and concludes that a systemic approach will be more feasible. The application of a model of three systems - the source text system, the translation situation system and the target text system - for translation evaluation would be relevant to many translators who have to translate something from cultures widely different from their own.