Quality Assessment of the Persian Translation of ‘Introductory Handbook on the Prevention of Recidivism and the Social Reintegration of the Offenders’ Based on House TQA Model[Latin Thesis]

Narges Rasouli Dogaheh

This study aimed to assess the quality of the Persian translation of an English-language law text ('Introductory Handbook on the Prevention of Recidivism and the Social Reintegration of Offenders') by Gholami Hossein and Hamidreza Nikookar (2016), based on House TQA model (1997). To this end, 80 paragraphs of the Source Text were randomly selected from among the text. The register analysis of the Source Text was done and the genre was examined. The Source Text profile was compared with the Target Text Profile. Covertly erroneous errors resulting from dimensional mismatches on field, tenor and mode and overtly erroneous errors resulting from a mismatch of the denotative meanings of source and translation text elements, which were categorized as 1) Not Translated, 2) Slight change in meaning, 3) Significant change in meaning, 4) Distortion of meaning, 5) Breach of the SL system, 6) Creative translation, and 7) Cultural filtering, were identified. The frequency and percentage of the overtly erroneous errors were counted. The results indicated that the translation was a covert one. The most significant dimensional mismatches were syntactic mismatches on field and tenor and the ST’s interpersonal functional component was violated to a minor degree while the ideational component of ST’s function was violated to a higher degree. The most frequent overt error was “breach of the source language system” with the frequency of 112 and percentage of 0.318% indicating that the translators tried to be more bound to the target language. The second most frequent overt error was “slight changes in meaning “with frequency of 77 and percentage of 0.219% indicating that the content of the ST was not exactly conveyed to the TT. The findings of this study can be used in translator training courses by instructors or translators who teach or work on legal translation.