Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

participation: simple / complex

social role relationship

social attitude

province

According to House (1997: 42), the textual profile of a text, which characterizes the function of the source text and which constitutes the yardstick with which translation quality is evaluated, is obtained by using the situational dimensions to analyze the source text and by correlating the linguistic features of the text (syntactic, lexical and textual) with these situational dimensions.
A similar text analysis process is undertaken on the translation text, and the textual profile that ensues is matched against that of the source text. If the translation text does not match the source text along a particular contextual dimension, then this is taken to be an error, or more precisely, a “covertly erroneous error”, using House’s terminology (Ibid: 45). This is different from an “overtly erroneous error”, where the error is the result of either “a mismatch of the denotative meanings of the source and translation text elements, or a breach of the target language system, more

specifically cases of ungrammaticality and dubious acceptability” (Ibid). Concerning this point, House maintains that in translation training, more attention has “traditionally been given to overtly erroneous errors whereas covertly erroneous errors, which demand a much more qualitative- descriptive in-depth analysis, have often been neglected” (Ibid).

The original form of House’s text analysis and translation assessment model (1977) is reproduced below:
Source Text (ST):

1.