THE APPLICATION OF HOUSE'S (2015) TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT MODEL TO ARABIC-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Abstract

Literary translation has gained momentum among scholars and researchers due to the peculiar and ambiguous nature of the literary genre(s). The salient discourse features of these genres do pose serious challenges for translators in their attempting to access the source text and to creatively transfer intentions embedded in the source text to target readerships. The selected work is written by the Sudanese novelist El Tayeb Salih, and translated into English by the Canadian-born British translator, Denys Johnson-Davies. This paper focuses on the relationship between the source text(ST)and the target text(TT) in order to identify mismatches, classify them into overt and covert errors and categorize the related overt errors into seven categories, namely not translated, slight change of meaning, significant change of meaning, distortion of meaning, breach of the target language system, creative translation and cultural filtering. The paper, to some extent, found out that the translator has translated the paper under investigation faithfully, however, a number of mismatches were found and accounted for. And since the translation is intended for a non-Arabic speaker, the translation of specific cultural terms and references should consider the limited cultural background of the target text reader (TT-R) which the translator neglected in some parts of his translation. The analysis can state that the translator is not tied to the culture, community and language of the ST; rather he gave preference more to get comparability of the TT. It was also observed that House's model of Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) is applicable and useful in the field of translation of literary works, for both the translator and the student of translation studies.