Discourse and Translation Quality Assessment of Literary Texts

Translation of literary works is more difficult than translating other types of texts particularly when the languages are linguistically and culturally different. However the aim of this paper was to assess the quality of English-Azari Turkish translation text, based on House’s (1991) revised discoursal model in the broad Hallidayan conception of linguistics. Based on House’s (1991) revised discoursal model, a literary work has to be translated overtly, and any deviation from it would be considered as an error. The errors were twofold. First, the mismatches and differences along the analysis of the textual profiles of the source text and target text revealed the covertly erroneous errors. Second, the overtly erroneous errors categorized as 1) Creative Translation; 2) Not Translated; 3) Slight Change in Meaning; 4) Distortion of Meaning; and 5) Breach of the Target Language System were found through the in-depth analysis of the text. Regarding overtly /covertly erroneous errors, the findings of the study demonstrated that the translator have not succeeded in translating this literary work overtly. In other words, this translation can be considered as a covert translation rather than an overt one

Keywords:

Discourse , Translation Quality Assessment , House’s revised discoursal model