The Application of House’s Model to William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” and its Persian Translation by Saleh Hosseini

Introduction

Juliane House’s model on translation quality assessment is one of the most recent and applicable ones as she has considered almost all kinds of texts and translational theories in her study. She divided theories toward meaning into three categories, namely, mentalist view, response-based view and discourse and text-based view (House, 1976). She stated that her view is a part of discourse-based view.

According to Juliane House (1997), the essence of translation lies in the preservation of “meaning” across two languages. There are three aspects to this “meaning”: semantic, pragmatic and textual such that translation may be defined as the replacement of a text in the source language by a semantically and pragmatically equivalent text in the target language. (Here, the scholar is just concerned with written texts, as translation of oral texts is defined as interpretation).The ultimate goal for her is functional equivalence. To get the functional equivalence, situational dimensions and linguistic materials are defined. She concluded that in translation assessment, the critic have to find two kinds of mismatches between the two texts. One of these mismatches is overtly erroneous error and the other one is covertly erroneous error. Based on these factors, she introduced two kinds of translation: Overt vs. Covert Translations.

Overt translation, according to House, is the one in which TT addressees are not directly addressed. It is tied to source language and culture and should be remained as intact as possible. It is a straightforward translation and has got less cultural problems than the covert one. Overt translations are divided into two types: Overt Historically-linked and Overt Timeless translations (House, 1976).

Overt translation is a translation of the target text which is not meant to be the same as the source text. In spite of that, the target text still refers to the source text so that its equivalences must be sought at the level of language/text, register, and genre. As indicated by the name, overt translation itself claims that the result is “translation”, not the real work. A translation is categorized as “overt” if the result reads like a translation.

On the contrary, covert translation is “a translation which enjoys the status of being an original source text in the target culture” (Munday, 2001). A covert translation reads like an original text, not like a product of translation. Modifications are made to make it acceptable by the target culture. This kind of translation is directly addressed to a TL culture audience. Covert translation needs cultural filter. These two kinds of translations cover almost every kind of texts. Overt translation includes political, literary, religious, etc texts; on the other hand covert translation consists of business circulars, scientific texts, journalistic texts, advertisements, information booklets, etc.

The Housian TQA Model uses a socio-semiotic approach for translation quality assessment. This assessment is based on the similarity between the source text and the target text in terms of the register variables, the genre, and the ideational and interpersonal meaning.

Review of the Literature

Evaluating the quality of a translated work has been one of the main concerns of the Translation Studies. Despite the drastic progress in and evolution of Translation Studies, developing/establishing a good set of criteria, in order to solve the various problems regarding the quality of translation has not yet been achieved or at least there is no or little consensus about this issue.

There have been many attempts to build a model for evaluating the quality of a translated work. Translation quality assessment studies, according to House, can be divided into three major categories: 1) there are pre-linguistic studies, in which subjective and not-so-much clear statements, regarding the quality of a translated work, are the major trend, e.g. Savory’s list of principles for a translation of optimal value. 2) There are psycholinguistic studies. In these studies translation quality is judged in terms of the effect a translation should have on the readership, e.g. Nida and Taber. 3) There are source-text based studies which attempt to build linguistic criteria in order to account for both the source text and the target text.

There are also pragmatic models presented by Koller (1974) and Reiss (1968, 1971a, b, 1973). Malcolm Williams divides Translation Quality Assessment Models into two main types: (1) models with a quantitative dimension, such as SEPT (1979) and Sical (1986), and (2) non-quantitative, textological models, such as Nord (1991) and House (1997).

House has developed a comprehensive linguistic model of translation quality assessment, which includes eight situational-contextual dimensions based on Crystal and Davy’s system (1969), in addition to linguistic correlates; as it has been elaborated on in the previous sections.

Sara Viola Rodriguez (1996) has “tested House’s model on ideational and interpersonal English source-texts translated into Portuguese from a wide range of provinces.” She, also, “selected “The Me Decade and the Third Great awakening”, one of the essays in Tom Wolf’s “The Purple Decades”, published in the United States in 1982, as the ST. As far as the TT is concerned, she chose Luiz Fernando Brandao’s version, published by LPM, Brazil, in 1989.” to verify the “practical value of House’s translation typology.”

Juliane House in “Translation Quality Assessment, A Model Revisited” (chapter 5), compares some source and translated texts (a children’s book, an autobiography, a philosophical essay, and a history text) by using her revised model.

Harris Hermansyah Setiajid (2003) tried to “look into two models of the socio-semiotic approach, an approach inspired by Halliday’s Systemic-Functional linguistics, which emphasizes the importance of context, both context of situation and context of culture, in reconstructing the meaning of a text”. These two models are Juliane House’s and Roger T. Bell’s models. The purpose of Harris’s research is to find the similarities and the differences between the two. It turns out that House’s model utilizes register variables, i.e. field, tenor, and mode, for translation quality assessment, while Bell’s model exploits three language meta-functions, i.e. the ideational, interpersonal, and textual, in translation.

Methodology

The House’s model is commonly applied in translation quality assessment     by doing the following chronological steps:

(a)  Doing a register analysis to get the source text profile;

(b) Describing source text genre realized in register;

(c) Giving a statement of function to the source text related with ideational and interpersonal meaning;

(d) Treating the target text in the same way as the source text was treated above;

(e) Comparing the two text profiles to produce a statement of “inequivalence” which is categorized according to the genre and the situational dimension of the genre and register. The errors found are categorized into “covertly erroneous errors” and “overtly erroneous errors”;

(f) Providing a statement of quality with reference to the translation result; and

(g) Categorizing the translation result into two kinds: overt translation and covert translation.

As the original text is a literary work, according to House, it has to have an overt kind of translation.

For doing the analysis, two kinds of errors, namely overtly erroneous errors and covertly erroneous errors, should be looked for. The former is divided into five subcategories:

1. Wrong translations: This consists of those mistakes which comprise complete distortion of meaning.
2. Not translated: This comprises those words/expressions which are not translated either because of translator’s negligence or not being able to translate.
3. Deficiencies in translation: This means that there exists a little distortion of meaning, partial transference of meaning or not complete faithfulness to ST but not so severe.
4. Creative translations: Here, the translator has translated the ST somehow freely by adding some extra words/information or so which were not necessary.
5. Breach of TL system: This means deviating the TL norms and/or syntax.

And the latter, as mentioned by House, is done by making an ST profile and comparing it with its TT counterpart.

Some examples, about 10% for each subcategory, of overtly erroneous errors along with their analyses and ST and TT profiles are provided. This is done by transcription of the underlined parts, which show the problematic parts, and then the word for word translations are provided and compared with the translation to show the deficiencies or problems of them. After that, the frequencies of the occurrences of each of those problems by the Persian translator were counted. Finally, Chi-Square was run to compute the results of the data.

Results and Discussion

ST Profile

Field:

Subject matter

Social action

Novel

General and Popular

Tenor:

Author’s provenance and stance

Social role relationship

Social

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