TQA in Three Different Schools of Thought

The most important schools of thought involving the miscellaneous notions towards TQA are as follows:

Mentalist Views

In this school, subjective and intuitive evaluations of a translation have been undertaken since long by writers, philosophers, and many others, consisting of such global judgments as "the translation does justice to the original" or "the tone of the original is lost in the translation" and so forth. In a newer guise, such intuitive assessments are being propagated by neo-hermeneutic translation scholars who regard translation as an individual creative act depending exclusively on subjective interpretation and transfer decisions, artistic-literary intuitions and interpretive skills and knowledge. In short, this school is subjective and intuitive in nature, where vague and hermeneutic statements of translation quality are the prevailing norms.

Response-Based Approaches

This school of thought is illustrated precisely in its two sub divisions as follows:

Behaviorist Views

As opposed to the previous subjective-intuitive approach to TQA, the behaviorist view aims at a more "scientific" way of evaluating translations dismissing the translator's mental actions as belonging to some in principle unknowable "black box". This tradition which has been influenced by American structuralism and behaviorism is most famously associated with Nida's pioneering work (1964) in which readers' reactions to a translation were taken as the main yardstick for assessing a translation's quality, positing global behavioral criteria, such as e.g. intelligibility and informativeness and stating that a "good" translation is one leading to "equivalence of response"a concept clearly linked to his principle of "dynamic equivalence of translation", i.e., that the manner in which receptors of a translation respond to the translation should be "equivalent" to the manner in which the source text's receptors respond to the original. Nida operationalzed this equivalence as comprising equal "informativeness" and "intelligibility". Assuming that it is true that a "good' translation should elicit a response equivalent to the response to its original; we must immediately ask whether it is possible to measure an "equivalent response", let alone "informativeness" or "intelligibility". If these phenomena can't be measured, it is useless to postulate them as criteria for TQA. And indeed, even the most imaginative tests designed to establish verifiable and observable responses a translation presumably evokes using for instance reading aloud techniques, various close and rating procedures have finally failed to provide the desired results, because they were unable to capture such a complex phenomenon as the "quality of a translation". Further, the source text is largely ignored in all these methods, which means that nothing can be said about the relationship between original and translation, nor about whether a translation is in fact a translation and not another secondary text derived via a different textual operation.

Functionalist, "Skopos" Related Approach

Adherents of this approach (Reiss and Vermeer1988) claim that it is the "skopos' or purpose of a translation that is of overriding importance in judging a translation's quality. The way target culture norms are heeded or flouted by a translation is the critical yardstick in evaluating a translation. It is the translator or more frequently the translation brief he is given by the person(s) commissioning the translation that decide on the function the translation is to fulfill in its new environment. The notion of "function", critical in this theory, is however never made explicit, let alone operationalized in any satisfactory way. It seems to be something very similar to the real-world effect of a text. How exactly one is to go about determining the relative equivalence and adequacy of a translation, let alone how exactly one is to go about determining the linguistic realization of the "skopos" of a translation, is not clear. Most importantly, however, it naturally flows from the crucial role assigned to the "purpose" of a translation that the original is reduced to a simple "offer of information", with the word "offer" making it immediately clear that this "information" can freely be accepted or rejected as the translator sees fit. But since any translation is simultaneously bound to its ST and to the presuppositions and conditions governing its reception in the new environment, Skopos theory can not be said to be an adequate theory when it comes to tackling the evaluation of a translation in its fundamental bidirectionality.

Text and Discourse Based Approaches

The most significant subgroups fallen under this category are enumerated as follows:

Literature Oriented Approaches: Descriptive Translation Studies

This approach is oriented squarely towards the translation text: A translation is evaluated predominantly in terms of its forms and functions inside the system of the receiving culture and literature (Toury, 1995). The original is of subordinate importance, the main focus retrospective from translation to original being "actual translations", and the textual phenomena that have come to be known in the target culture as translations. The idea towards TQA in this approach is to first of all attempt to "neutrally" describe the characteristics of that text as they are perceived on the basis of native (receptor) culture members' knowledge of comparable texts in the same genre. However, if one aims at judging a particular text which is plainly not an "independent", "new" product of one culture only, such a retrospective focus seems peculiarly inappropriate for making valid statements about how and why a translation qua translation is as it is. While the solid empirical-descriptive work and the emphasis put on contextualization at the micro-level of the reception situation and the macro-level of the receiving culture at large, as well as the inclusion of both a "longitudinal" (temporal, diachronic) and a (synchronic) systemic perspective (considering the poly-systemic relations into which the translation enters with other texts in the receiving cultural system), is certainly commendable, the approach does fail to provide criteria for judging the merits and weaknesses of a particular text. In other words, this shortcoming entails such debatable questions as: How are we to judge whether one text is a translation and another one not? And what are the criteria for judging merits and weaknesses of a given "translation text"?

Post Modernist and Deconstructionist Thinking

Scholars belonging to this approach (e.g. Venuti, 1995) try to critically examine translation practices and processes from a psycho-philosophical and socio-political stance in an attempt to unmask unequal power relations, which may appear as a certain skewing in the translation. In a plea for making translations (and especially translators as their "creators") "visible" and for revealing ideological and institutional manipulations, proponents of this approach aim to make politically appropriate (and "correct") statements about the relationship between features of the original text and the translation text. They concentrate on the hidden forces shaping both the process of selecting what gets translated in the first place and the procedures that result in the ways original texts are bent and twisted in the interests of powerful individuals and groups when choosing texts for translation and adopting particular strategies of re-textualization. This is thus certainly a worthwhile undertaking, especially when it comes to explaining the influence translators can exert through their translation on the receiving national literature and its canon.

Linguistically Oriented Approaches

Pioneering linguistic work in TQA includes the programmatic suggestions by Catford (1965), the early Reiss (1971), Wilss (1974), Koller (1979) and the translation scholars of the Leipzig school. In more recent times, several linguistically oriented works on translation such as e.g. by Baker (1992), Doherty (1993), Hatim and Mason (1997), Hickey (1998), Gerzymisch-Arbogast and Mudersbach (1998) have made valuable contributions to evaluating a translation by the very fact that all these authors although not directly concerned with TQA widened the scope of translation studies to include concerns with linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, stylistics and discourse analysis.

Linguistic approaches take the relationship between source and translation text seriously, but they differ in their capacity to provide detailed procedures for analysis and evaluation. Most promising are approaches which explicitly take account of the interconnectedness of context and text, since the inextricable link between language and the real world is both definitive in meaning making and in translation. Such a view of translation as re-contextualization is the line taken in a functional-pragmatic TQA model first developed 25 years ago and recently revised by Juliane House (1997 and 1981), which is also the model to be studied in the current thesis.