Translation Quality Assessment of Audiovisual Materials, a Case Study of Persian Subtitles of an English Movie

Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) as an evaluation notion has been a growing interest. Various approaches towards TQA proposed by translation studies scholars namely Vinay & Darbelnet (1977), Newmark (1991), House (1981,1997), Pym (1992), Nord (1996), Hatim & Mason (1997), Steiner (1994) , Larose (1989) Bensoussan & Rosenhouse (1994), Snell-Hornby (1995) ,etc. But, the German scholar Juliane House was one of the first who stressed on TQA as a functional-pragmatic model. Her revisited model (1997) is based on the analysis of register i.e. field, tenor and mode in which a textual profile of source text (ST) and of target text (TT) are analyzed and compared systematically. Since, in most cases subtitling is practiced by fanssubs (amateur translators on the internet), thus, the need was felt to conduct such studies to assess this scope of translation. In the present paper attempts made to deeply explore House's (1997) TQA and its applicability in pinpointing errors and mismatches in Persian subtitles of English movies. To this end, a 126-minute American movie, Good Will Hunting (1997), was selected for the corpus of the study. The research was run as follows: 1. producing a profile of ST (the English movie) register involving an accurate description of ST field, tenor and mode 2. Producing the same profile description for the TT (the Persian Subtitle) 3. Comparing rigorously the ST profile and that of TT. Then, the dimensional and non-dimensional errors were identified and categorized. Dimensional errors deal with the pragmatic mismatches of language use and user, and non-dimensional errors are the mismatches between the denotative meaning of ST and that of TT, and also breach of target language system. Covertly erroneous errors i.e. dimensional errors were examined. According to the House' (1997) model, two covertly erroneous errors were identified which are the mismatches of Tenor and Mode. As to the Tenor, the author's provenance and stance and that of the translator were not identical since, the author was a screenwriter but the translator was a fanssub. Regarding the mode, the ST mode was spoken (dialogues in the movie) but the TT mode was written (subtitles). And finally, overtly erroneous errors were further classified into four categories 1.Not-translated; 2.Mistranslation including both significant changes and slight changes of meaning; 3.Redundencies and 4.Breach of target language system levels. The research's results indicated that the errors of the category 2 i.e. Mistranslation, were mainly due to misrendering of idioms, slang and polysemous words. Finally, as House (1997) points out that translation can be categorized into two sorts: Overt translation and Covert Translation in which the overt translation does not mean to be an original i.e. reader knows it is a translation but, in covert translation the reader is not mindful of reading a translation. This analyzed translation (Persian subtitles) was considered as an Overt Translation simply because the subtitles remind the TT viewers of translation which is visually shown.

کلیدواژه ها:

Translation ، Quality ، Assessment ، Subtitle ، Error