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Stage 1: Unmarked Forms
FOCUS ON TEXT FORMATS OF
Instructional Expository Argumentative
Stage 2: Unmarked Forms (Expectation-Fulfilling)
FOCUS ON NEGOTIATION PROCEDURES IN
Text Discourse Genre
Stage 3: Marked Forms (Expectation-Defying)
Instructional Expository Argumentative
Translation Assessment Overview
According to Chau (1984), “one of the main tasks of translation pedagogy is the testing of the students at various levels of the programme”. House (1997: 167) also stresses the importance of translation assessment in training translators, arguing that
a theory of translation and translation quality assessment must underlie any pedagogic training for translators.
For Mason (1987: 79), however, translation evaluation has not been dealt with as extensively and as thoroughly as translating activity despite its potential capability for clarifying even further the nature of the latter. The exception here, in Mason’s view, is the work of House (1977) which he considers as “the most thorough attempt at evolving a model for translation quality assessment” (Mason: p. 83). Nevertheless, Mason maintains that translation assessment is lagging behind compared with the new developments in translating activity where translating is no longer regarded as a comprehension exercise but as a communicative activity:
“The assumptions on which are based the assessment tasks, which we all have to perform regularly, are seldom re-examined and there may be a danger that, while our conception of the rationale for translating on a degree course is evolving, assessment is static and rests upon a conception of translation as an exercise in scaling a series of linguistic hurdles, each one carrying penalty points, graded according to the degree of linguistic or lexical sophistication involved” (Ibid)
Thus, for the purpose of attaining “standardization and consistency of grading in translation testing”, Mason argues that “a common meta- language is needed” (Ibid: 80):
If any meaningful exchange of views and experiences is to take place, the vague and impressionistic terms “reads well”, “stilted”, “doesn’t sound right”, “captures the spirit of”, etc. must be replaced by a set of terms for the proper and precise analysis of texts (ST or TT) and their function in context – and these terms will themselves define a set of criteria for forming judgements about translations” (Mason 1997: 80 – 81).
Accordingly, Mason proposes a metalanguage for the analysis of texts and for the evaluation of quality of a TT with respect to its ST.
This metalanguage consists of the following categories: communicative context (field, mode and tenor), pragmatic context (speech acts, text act, etc.), semiotic context (text type, genre and discourse), structure and texture.
For House (1997), dealing with translation evaluation forces one to address “the heart of any theory of translation, i.e. the crucial question of the nature of translation” (p. 1), and, more specifically, the nature of the relationship between a ST and its translation, as well as the relationship between ST features and language users (i.e. the writer, translator and receiver).
However, according to House, different approaches to translation activity will yield different conceptions of translation quality assessment. These approaches are classified into four main categories: early reflections on translation quality assessment, the neo-hermeneutic approach, the response-oriented approaches and the text-based approaches.
To discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a given translation, early reflections on translation quality assessment made use of criteria such as faithfulness to the original, safeguarding the original’s special flavour, preserving the spirit of the original and the enjoyment experienced by the reader of the translation. (House 1997: 1)
The neo-hermeneutic approach regarded the comprehension, interpretation and translation of the ST as “individual creative acts”, and a “good” translation as a result of the identification of the translator with the original. This identification, however, according to House, does not guarantee a translation of quality. (House 1997: 2)
Both the early reflections and the neo-hermeneutic approach are said to adopt a subjective view of translation assessment (Ibid). The neo- hermeneutic is said to be dependent on “personal knowledge, intuitions, interpretive skills and artistic literary competence” (Ibid). In other words, the attempt to set up empirically based and transparent criteria for the evaluation of translations is therefore not considered worthwhile. Moreover, both these approaches are said to ignore the relationship between the ST and the translation. In addition to this, these approaches are criticized for disregarding the expectations of the target audience.
House also criticizes the relativisation of content by the neo- hermeneutic approach:
Such extreme relativisation of content is inappropriate as a guideline for evaluating translations: a translation is not a private affair but normally
carries with it a threefold responsibility to the author, the reader and the text. (Ibid: 3)
The third main approach to translation assessment according to House is the one advocated by Nida (1964), namely the response-oriented approach. This builds on the basic tenet that a translation should produce equivalent responses. For House, this approach has two weaknesses which have to do with the difficulty of testing empirically the degree of equivalent response and a disregard of the original text.
The last main approach to translation assessment, a text-based approach, is thus by far superior and subsumes two sub-approaches: a functionalist approach and a set of linguistic sub-approaches.
The functionalist approach takes into consideration the purpose of the translation. Consequently, the most important criterion for assessing a translation in this approach is the extent to which the expectations of the target readers are taken into account. In this regard, House states:
Given the primacy of the purpose of a translation, it is the way target culture norms are heeded that is the most important yardstick for assessing the quality of a translation (Ibid: 11)
In the linguistic sub-approaches, on the other hand, the source text is considered as the most important element in translation activity and translation assessment. The source text is viewed here not merely in terms of its linguistic and textual structures but also, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of a broader view of its context of situation which includes communicative, pragmatic and semiotic dimensions. According to House (1997: 17), the main representatives of this approach are Reiss in the 1970s (a text type approach), Neubert in the 1980s (a textual and pragma-linguistic approach) and Hatim & Mason’s model in the 1990s (a discourse model).
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