Translation quality assessment : a situational/textual model for the evaluation of Arabic/English translations

Benhaddou, M

Abstract

Translation evaluation is one of the main concerns of translation
theorists, members of translation revision boards, and most
importantly it is the concern of translator trainers. Translation
quality has often been associated with the correctness of the
grammatical structure and the appropriateness of the lexical item.
Little concern has empirically been given to units larger than the
sentence, i.e. text. This seems to be the result of the prevailing
linguistic trend that has put more emphasis on a -context-free'
sentence, rather than on text in context.
This study proposes to investigate, discuss and develop a
translation quality assessment model that takes text, not a sentence
as the ultimate aim of analysis. The study will also attempt to
explore the theoretical and practical implications of the model to be
developed for the training of translators in the Arab world.
The model to be developed should be based on the definition that
translation is the replacement of a text in the source language by a
semantically, pragmatically and textually equivalent text in the
target language. Text, then, is the focus of interest in this study.
Therefore, the model will be developed within the framework of text
lingui4Vics for which text is regarded as a communicative occurrence.
The developed model will serve as a means to evaluating the quality
of Arabic-English translations of a particular type of texts,
argumentative text type. Therefore, two argumentative texts in the
form of newspaper editorials, selected from two Moroccan quality
newspapers will be analyzed along the dimensions of what will be known
in this study as a Situational/Textual model. The resultant "textual
profile" will, then, be taken as a "yardstick" against which will be
measured 81 translations collected from Fand School of Advanced
Translation (FST) and 5 from the department of modern languages,
Salford University (SU).
The first introductory chapter lays out the main arguments of the
thesis. Chapters two and three present and discuss sentence-oriented
translation models, and text-oriented translation models respectively.
Chapter four presents and discusses the following: a) the three
aspects of meaning: semantic, pragmatic, and textual, b) language
function vs. text function, and finally C) House's (1981) model of
translation quality assessment. Chapter five presents the method of
operation, discusses the decision criteria needed to deal with the
dimensions linguistic correlates, and finally illustrates the extended
situational/textual model for translation quality assessment. Chapter
six is the application of the model on the two Arabic argumentative
texts. In addition, argumentative text structure will be discussed and
the difference between Arabic and English argumentative texts will be
explained. Finally, chapter seven includes the source language text
(SLT), and the target language text (TLT) statement of comparison and
statement of quality, and a discussion of the theoretical implication
of the model for the training of translators in the Arab world.

Citation

Benhaddou, M. Translation quality assessment : a situational/textual model for the evaluation of Arabic/English translations. (Thesis). University of Salford, UK

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jun 16, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 16, 2009
• Additional Information: Additional Information : PhD supervisor: Dr H. Mustapha
• Award Date: Jan 1, 1991