A Functional Approach to Translation Quality Assessment of Literary Texts: Evaluating Two Persian Translations of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Authors
B. S. Seyed Jalali
S. modarres khiabani
S. M. Karimi Behbahani
PhD student in linguistics Alzahra University
Abstract
Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) is one of the most noteworthy sub-fields of Translation Studies. The current qualitative descriptive study applied House's (1997) model, which is based on Hallidayan Systemic-Functional Theory, to investigate the quality of Farsi translations of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey translated by Milad Zakaria and Omid Nikfarjam. As House has suggested, translations are categorized into covert and overt ones. An overt translation, in contrast to covert translation which is domesticated toward target language, is one that must overtly be a translation with probable unfamiliar cultural elements. House claims that overt translation is preferred for culture-oriented texts, particularly literary ones. By applying Houses’s model, the present study aims to investigate the way in which the function of literary text is represented in target language system. To this end, selected segments of the corpus were compared and contrasted to their Persian equivalences in two mentioned translations. The findings of this research revealed that although both translations tended to familiarize the text to the translation audiences, Milad Zakaria’s translation was more overt compared with the translation by Omid Nikfarjam. Therefore, it can be claimed that the first translation is functionally more adequate compared to the second one in preserving the “function” of source text in target language.

Keywords

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Language Related Research
Volume 8, Issue 7
March and April 2017
Pages 159-182