Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

Equivalence and translation evaluation in House’s Model

House’s model (1977) (1997) is a linguistically-oriented model. This model offers a method for analyzing the linguistic and situational features of the ST and the TT, and thereby characterizing the function of the individual text. Concerning translation evaluation per se, the model suggests comparing the ST textual profile, which is an account of the linguistic and situational correlations and in which the function of the text is characterized, with the textual profile of the TT. This profile then becomes “the yardstick” with which the quality of a translation is assessed.

In addition to drawing on insights from pragmatic theories of language use and Halliday’s functional and systematic theory so as to characterize the textual profile of an individual text, the model is also fundamentally based on an elaborate concept of equivalence that is used as a criterion for evaluating the quality of a translation.

Reiss’s notion of equivalence is invoked as “the relationship between an original and its translation whenever both fulfil the same communicative function” (Reiss in House 1997: 29). House defines the nature of this relationship further as the preservation of semantic, pragmatic and textual meanings across two different languages; but she subjects all these types of meaning first to the requirement that the TT has the same function as the ST.
Equivalence I take to be the fundamental criterion of translation quality. Thus, an adequate translation text is a pragmatically and semantically equivalent one. As a first requirement for this equivalence it is posited that a translation text has a function equivalent to that of its source text. (House 1997: 32)
Moreover, House makes the interesting point that the relationship between a ST and a TT is a double-binding one:
Translation is characterized by a double-binding relationship both to its source and to the communicative conditions of the receiving linguaculture. (Ibid: 29)
Building on this definition, House distinguishes between overt and covert translation:
In overt translation the function of the translation is to enable its readers access to the function of the original in its original linguacultural setting through another language. By contrast, the function of a covert translation is to imitate the original’s function in a different discourse world… One of the means of achieving this functional equivalence is through the employment of a cultural filter, with which shifts and changes along various pragmatic parameters are conducted. (Ibid)
Establishing equivalence when translating, then, necessitates first making a global and strategic choice as to the general direction of the translation: is it towards the ST or towards “the communicative conditions of the receiving linguaculture?”

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