Introduction

Translation quality assessment (TQA) is a fundamental element of some translation theories. The House’s TQA model (1997) and Hallidayan systemic- functional theory, were inspired with Prague school ideas, speech act theory, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and corpus-based differences between spoken and written language. The model involves three different aspects of the analysis of the source text (ST) and assessing the quality of its translation: language/ text, register (field, tenor, and mode), and Genre (House, 2001).

     The field involves the subject matter and social action. Tenor refers to a social attitude (formal or informal style) between the author and the audiences. Mode describes the ‘channel’ (spoken/written), and the amount of participation between the addressee and addresser (monologue, dialogue, etc.) (Munday, 2016).  Moreover, genre allows one to refer each textual exemplar to the type of texts with which it shares a general purpose (House, 2001).

     According to Halliday (1994), there are three types of meanings: textual, ideational, and interpersonal meanings. Ideational meanings conform to the field and explain the participants, processes, and circumstances. Interpersonal meanings represent the tenor and indicate ways to communicate with others. Also, textual meanings signify the mode and refer to cohesion analysis (as cited in De Oliveira, 2015).

     Many scholars such as Venuti (1995/ 2008), Newmark (1981), Nida (1969), House (1997), and Nord (1997) believe that the general feature of translation is literal (word-for-word) or free (sense-for-sense) (Munday, 2001). House suggests that ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ translations are based on the mentioned features. Overt translation reflects the elements of the translated text clearly, and is faithful to the ST. Contrary to overt translation, covert translation enjoys the status of ST in the target culture, and makes the information which is implicit in the ST explicit in the target language (TL) (House, 1997). Other scholars emphasize ‘faithfulness’ to the original text and maintenance of the spirit of ST by presenting a word-for-word translation. For example, Benjamin (1969/ 2004) states that a foreign text should ‘shine’ through the translation, and ‘pure language’ should be demonstrated following direct interaction between the two languages (as cited in Medadian & Nezhadansari, 2015).

     As House (1997) states, any mismatch between the ST and the TT is considered an error. Therefore, mismatches are divided into two categories: ‘covertly erroneous errors’ (any dimensional mismatch, e.g. neglecting the features such as field, mode, and tenor during translating), and ‘overtly erroneous errors’ (the mismatches of denotative meanings of ST and TT and breaches of target language scheme).   

     In this study, the researchers used House’s (1997) model to analyze the quality of English translations of Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A) letters to the youth in the Western countries. Supreme leader’s letters to European and North American youths is the Islamic Revolution’s new approach to international cultural diplomacy. The Supreme leader’s letter message, in summary, equivocates the principles that deal with images of Islam represented in the West by European and American media.  Addressing the youth, the Supreme Leader asserts that he trusts them and considers them having altruistic and justice-seeking spirit. This letter represents the manner of fighting and resisting Islamophobia, which can be a religious imperative for all the muslims across the world. (www.echoofislam.com).That is why Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A) letters to the youth in Western countries is highly important. Due to the importance of the mentioned letters in terms of the content, they have been translated into 50 languages, including English (Khamenei. ir). Considering that Islam deserves to be known the way it is, any effort such as texts made with this aim is noteworthy. It is not known whether these translations are qualified enough for transferring the original message, so assessing the quality of these translations can be done by TQA.

     Although political and religious discourses, such as Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A) letters to the youth in the Western countries, are of more importance and sensitivity than other kinds of discourses, the translation of these types of texts must also be taken into account.

     The first significant aspect of this research is that the researchers observed almost no case of translation quality assessment of Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A.) political and religious speech. Some religious-political discourses promote ethical and moral values. These discourses convey the key concepts to the readers with a sense of compassion, such as awareness about tragic events, avoiding violence, movement awaking, and so on. The major problem is whether this kind of feeling, along with the mentioned concepts, exactly affects the readers of the target text, and the original message is transferred correctly to the reader or not.  The last problem is concerned with misunderstanding and familiarizing the youths with the main content of these valuable letters.

  Review of the Literature

This section will address different approaches and models proposed by translation studies scholars for evaluating and/or assessing translation quality in one way or another.

     Williams (2004), asserts that when we attempt to classify TQA models, it would be preferable, according to the general trend in translation studies to divide all types and approaches to translation quality assessment into two categories: a) Quantitative models that tackle with micro textual analysis of the texts and work according to several errors in translation. These models attempt to explain the worth and benefits of translation numerically. b) Non-quantitative (qualitative) or general models that address a macro textual analysis of the texts and do not focus on finding the number of errors. The merit of the translation is explained according to the observance of the designed criterion for a piece of translation based on models. Along with TQA models, Williams deals with the discourse analysis to build a general whole-text framework for instrumental translation evaluation as well.

     As stated by Paltridge (2012), discourse analysis surveys styles of language beyond the texts and checks out the relationship between language and the social and cultural context in which it is used. It analyzes how the use of language is regulated by relationships between participants as well as the effects the use of language has upon social identities and relations. It also copes with how views of the world and identities are created across the use of discourse.

     House’s model operates based on a) A profile is created of the ST register. b) The description of the ST genre is identified by the register. c) ‘Statement of function’ that is for ST, consists of the ideational and interpersonal components of that function. d) Then the descriptive process is carried out for TT. e) The TT profile is compared to the ST profile and mismatches or errors are created and divided based on genre and to the situational aspects of register and genre; these features of errors are referred to as ‘covertly erroneous errors’ which are denotative mismatches or target system errors. f) Next, ‘the statement of quality’ is made of the translation. g) At last, the translation can be divided into two types: overt translation and covert translation (Munday, 2008).

     The difference between two various types of translation goes back to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1813) distinction between ‘alienating’ and ‘integrating’ translations. An overt translation must overtly be a translation, not a ‘second original.’ The source text is linked to source lingua culture as well as specially directed at source culture addresses. A covert translation is not addressed to the source culture audience and with its source text have equivalent purposes (House, 2016).

     Selecting overt and covert translation not only depends on the text or the translator’s subjective interpretation of the text but also on the purposes for the translation, the implied readers, and different publishing and marketing policies. In this manner, overt translation consists of political, simplified, literary, religious text, and so on, but covert translation includes business circulars, scientific texts, journalistic texts, advertisements, and information booklets (House, 2001). Moreover, if the source culture is both appealing and eminent to other communities, most translators apply an overt translation strategy in their target texts (House, 2006).

House (1997) mentions that overt translations, on the other hand, situations in which the source text is particularly directed at source culture addressees and can so confront only the socio-cultural setting of the original. In dealing with this kind of text, the translator would purpose for an exclusively defined kind of equivalence, with the target addressee being somehow ‘overtly’ sidelined (as cited in Munday, 2009).

     After House, Baker is the second theoretician who applied Halliday’s linguistic model in her book (1992). Baker considers equivalence at three different levels: at a word, above-word, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic levels.

     Word level: this equivalence consists of collocation meaning of a collection of the words.

Grammatical level: this equivalence consists of word order in a sentence.

     Textual level: this equivalence consists of thematic and information structures such as references, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.

     Pragmatic level: this level of equivalence considering coherence and procedures of interpretation such as speech act forces.

Nord’s notion of grades about translation quality is not comparable to the quantitative models. His model (1991) is similar to the House’s model (1997) in the fields of analyzing source and target texts and comparing them and utilizing cultural filter as well.

     His model consists of four processes:

     (1) An analysis of the TT: the TT is analyzed in connection with intra-textual items (such as grammatical, lexical, and stylistic normativity) and in connection with extra-textual items (such as the pragmatic dimensions of the recipient, time, place, etc.).

     (2) An analysis of the ST: the ST is analyzed based on the model of translation relevant text analysis. The critic requires concentrating on those items which have been found out as ‘problematic’ during TT assessment, such as coherence deficiencies, inconsistent terminology, interferences in lexicon or sentence structure, etc.

     (3) A comparison of the TT and the ST: This comparison leads to a TT profile.

     (4) A comparison of the TT profile and the target text: if the TT profile coinciding with the target text, the translation can be considered as functionally adequate.

     After determining the steps of TQA, it is needed for evaluating the quality of translations of the mentioned letters. The significance of this study is that TQA can help the readers get more acquainted with Islam through these translations and it can also save them from misunderstanding this divine religion. Eventually, this study has been done along with conducting translation quality assessment based on House’s model (1997) regarding the case of Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A) letters translated from Persian to English focuses on especially concepts such as overt translation, proper translation and so on.

     The first general purpose of this assessment is demonstrating the advantages of House’s TQA, and getting acquaint translators who are not familiar with this model. Training how to assessing the ST and TT for the sake of evaluating the quality of the translated texts and comparison of the different translated texts from the same ST is the second purpose. The final purpose is presenting the (good or week) translation quality of the discourses.

     After Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A) letters addressed to the youth in Western countries were translated into English and other European languages, they became international; therefore, they have become highly significant among the religious and political translations. The authors describe the recent events in the Islamic world for the European youths and inform them about the ‘Islam-o-phobia’ created by aggressive terrorism.

Methodology

Corpus

Imam Khamenei’s (D Ẓ. A) two letters addressing the Western youth, and translations of the letters from Persian into English formed the corpus of this study. The title of the letters is To the youth in Europe and North America, and can be found online. The first one was released on 21 January 2015, and the second one on 29 November 2015 and have been translated by unknown translators.  

Research design

The study is a qualitative research, descriptive, comparative, analytic, and synthetic method that is based on House’s framework in 1997.

Data Collection & Analysis

In the first step, the source text Farsi letters were studied carefully, and in the second step, the translations of the discourses as the target texts were studied. In the next step, cultural filtering, and all elements of House’s model were meticulously compared in the SL and TL to recognize the translation errors and mismatches.

     In the second step, the English translations of the letters were assessed to identify overt and covert translations.

 Data Analysis

In this section, Field, Tenor, Mode, Genre, and Functions of the STs as well as the overt erroneous errors which were found in the translations are presented.

     Field: The original discourse of the letter is persuasive and informative.

     Tenor: Imam Khamenei addresses the youth to make them aware of the bitter events of terrorism. He clearly views the events of terrorism as tragic. He has a sense of empathy and affection for them.

     Mode: this text is a monologue which addresses the youth with religious and political sentences.

     Genre: The original discourse of the Supreme Leader to the youth is persuasive and informative. The first letter is about the release of offensive images of the Islamic sanctities in a French magazine, and intensifies the flow of anti-Islamic and Islamo phobia in Western media. The second one is concerned with terrorism and the letter’s title is Today's Terrorism is our Common Concern. It emphasizes that Americans will not even have mercy on Europeans.

     Functions of the text: the source texts function is ideational and interpersonal.

The overtly erroneous errors are the mismatches of detonative meanings of the source and target texts as follows: 1. Transliteration; 2.  Literal translation; 3. Mistranslation (Distortion of meaning); 4.  Untranslation (Not translated term); 5.  Slight change in meaning; 6.  Significant change in meaning; 7.  Breach of Target Language System

Some of the sentences of the first translation and the second translation were analyzed as follows.

 The First Letter

Table 1

Slight Change in the Meaning

Table 2

Significant Change in the Meaning

Table 3

Untranslated Term          

The Second Letter

Table 4

Mistranslation

Table 5

Significant Change in the Meaning

Table 6

Breach of TL System

Table 7

Untranslated Term

Table 8

Slight Change in the Meaning

Discussion and conclusion

The House’s TQA (1997) model was used to assess the quality of English translations of some of the sentences of Imam Khamenei’s letters. Undoubtedly, it can be mentioned that in religious- political translations, there are a lot of translation errors and problems. Therefore, it is essential to assess the quality of translation in many religious- political works that have not been analyzed accurately in terms of translation errors and mismatches.  The obtained results are discussed in the light of the related body of literature.

     First, based on House's (1997) TQA model, the mismatches of the translations such as field and tenor were recognized. Next, the errors in the translations of two different discourses were distinguished. In fact, the translators have not committed any covert errors, but mismatches and errors found in the translation of selected sentences in Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A) letters were classified as overt errors. As stated previously, according to House’s TQA, because the source text is a religious- political text, it must be translated overtly. After that, in the selected sentences, overt errors of the translations in comparison with the source texts were evaluated. In the last part, the genre of the source texts, and functions of the texts were determined.

Thus, the source text profiles are compared to the text translations profile absolutely.

          According to House (1997), overt and covert translation types are distinguished by the examination of the presence or absence of a cultural filter. In other words, when a cultural filter is inserted into the TT, the translation is called covert, and when a cultural filter is not used, the TT is called overt. The researcher did not observe instances of cultural filtering in this research; thus, the translation can be generally described as overt. Overt translation fits the semantic purpose of the translation, while a covert dimension could have contributed to the communicative purpose of translation, which is missing here.

     The common overt erroneous errors on the translations are: 1- Not translated term 2- Slight change in the meaning

3- Significant change in the meaning 4- Distortion of meaning 5- Breach of the Language System.

     In these translations, overt errors about nontranslated terms, and distortion of meaning cause the reader not understand the concept of the sentence meaning correctly or lose an important point about the author’s statement. The slight change in the meaning does not cause damage to the meaning of sentences, for example, translating singular nouns into plural cannot change the meaning significantly.

     Incompatibility between tenses in STs and TTs, changing roles of terms, and translating passive sentences into active sentences are components of Breach of the Language System that were observed in the translations. Although all the elements of the Breach of the Language System are considered as overt errors, some of them do not cause serious problems in the quality of translation.

     The important points about mismatches can be summarized as follows:

1. With respect to the field, the mismatches were found in the areas of lexical, syntactic, and textual items. Many changes have occurred to the transmission of information. In lexical mismatches of TTs in this study such as omitting a term, translating the meaning wrongly, error in the correct expression of meaning, and incorrect equivalent mislead the reader. Therefore, the translator has not transmitted the original meaning. Also, regarding syntactic mismatches, there were slight Breach of Tl system. It should be noted that Breach of Tl System is a grammatical factor, and is enumerated as a syntactic mismatch in comparison with translations. In the last part as textual mismatches, there was just one case in the first translation.
2. With regard to tenor, the language of two source texts is formal in terms of register. Although these texts are formal, the social distance between the author and readers is friendly and intimate with the sense of empathy and commiseration. In Author's Personal (Emotional and Intellectual) stance, viewpoint in original text differs from translated texts in some cases. For example, misinterpreting and not translating some important phrases or words has neutralized or reduced the speaker’s sense of compassion or hatred about some the tragic events. 

     Finally, after applying the model to the translation of the first letter and both translations of the second letter, they were compared to assess the quality of translations, and see which of the translations of the second letter is more appropriate based on House’s TQA model.

     House’s model not only find the errors and mismatches but also will offer guidelines based on which translators and translator trainers can perform their jobs better next time they try to cope with the activity.

     Our main aim in this study was to assess the quality of translation as concerns the two English translations of the religious- political discourses written by Imam Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. We did so by applying House’s model of translation quality assessment to the above-mentioned translations after having applied the model to the source text itself with special attention to the main components of House’s model, including the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual meta functions as determining the more general components of field, tenor, and mode.

     Accordingly, the major contribution of the present research to Translation Studies is that it provides empirical data for demonstrating the application of House’s model to the analysis of political, ideological, and social effects. This information is important given that other studies conducted in the same area, namely political- religious discourses, were not to be detectable by the researcher although she did her best to locate any similar studies in this scope of translation quality assessment especially applying House’s translation quality assessment model.

     Translator trainers can also take advantage of the findings of the present study in that they can shift their focus from such banal subjects as the usual translation errors and ‘good’ or ‘bad’ points to much deeper, more comprehensive ones as ‘covert’ and ‘overt’ translation types.

Translation graders can also effectively exploit the tremendous potential of House’s model in the following manner: They can avoid being satisfied with the usual matters of trifling importance. Rather, they can organize the job of grading based on the more scientific, objective criteria posed by the present model.

The present study focused on the translation quality assessment of political- ideological discourse. Other future researchers can focus on other texts, either written or spoken, by the same authority in order to further investigate the applicability of House’s model to political and ideological translation.