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Keywords
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Translation Quality Assessment, Covert Translation, Overt Translation, Cultural Filter, Shahriyar
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Abstract
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The translation quality assessment as a sub-field of translation studies has attracted the attention of many translation
scholars with regard to academic investigations to evaluate the quality of translations. The present research aims to
assess the quality of English translation of Shahriyar's Persian poem '' ای وای مادرم '' by Behrooz Azabdaftari. For this end,
House's functional pragmatic model of translation quality assessment has been applied. Based on House's model, the
errors are categorized into two categories of covert and overt errors. The translations of first kind apply the cultural
filter and the second ones provide the second-level function. Accordingly, first, the back-translation of the English text
is provided. Then, the textual profile of both Persian and English texts were evaluated in terms of three lexical, syntactic
and textual levels on three dimensions of register (field, tenor and mode). It was found that the only overt error was
related to the ''field mismatches'' because of structural differences and no significant mismatch was observed in the case
of tenor and mode and even in the case of semantic and pragmatic equivalences. Despite the presupposition that the
literary texts require overt translation (House, 2015), the translation of the present poem is of covert one; because the
translator and original author enjoy the same cultural background and the translator is familiar with the elements such as
چادرنماز" ,'' تبریز'' ,'' باغ بیشه" " , to name but a few. In the cases such as '' پیت نفت '' and " آش و سبزی '', the translator has
applied the cultural filter so that the translation is read as an original text and it enjoys the status of a covert translation.
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