TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT: A SITUATIONAL/TEXTUAL MODEL FOR THE EVALUATION OF ARABIC/ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS.

摘要

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF.; Translation quality has often been associated with the correctness of the grammatical structure and the appropriateness of the lexical item. Little concern has empirically been given to units larger than the sentence, i.e. text. This seems to be the result of the prevailing linguistic trend that has put more emphasis on a 'context-free' sentence, rather than on text in context.; This study proposes to investigate, discuss and develop a translation quality assessment model that takes text, not a sentence as the ultimate aim of analysis. The study will also attempt to explore the theoretical and practical implications of the model to be developed for the training of translators in the Arab world.; The model will be developed within the framework of text linguistics for which text is regarded as a communicative occurrence. Two argumentative texts in the form of newspaper editorials, selected from two Moroccan quality newspapers will be analyzed along with dimensions of what will be known in this study as a Situational/Textual model. The resultant "textual profile" will, then, be taken as a "yardstick" against which will be measured 81 translations collected from Fahd School of Advanced Translation (FST) and 5 from the department of modern languages, Salford University (SU).; The first introductory chapter lays out the main arguments of the thesis. Chapters two and three present and discuss sentence-oriented translation models, and text-oriented translation models respectively. Chapter four presents and discusses the following: (a) the three aspects of meaning: semantic, pragmatic, and textual; (b) language function vs. text function; and finally (c) House's (1981) model of translation quality assessment. Chapter five presents the method of operation, discusses the decision criteria needed to deal with the dimensions linguistic correlates, and finally illustrates the extended situational/textual model for translation quality assessment. Chapter six is the application of the model on the two Arabic argumentative texts. Finally, chapter seven includes the source language text (SLT), and the target language text (TLT) statement of comparison and statement of quality, and a discussion of the theoretical implication of the model for the training of translators in the Arab world. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)