A Study of Translation Errors in Relation to Text Rhetorical Modes and Genre Types

Abstract

Delivering a high quality translation has always been important to translators and translation studies’ scholars. In recent years Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) has received a lot of attention and translation scholars have tried their best to find a way that would lead translators to a higher quality translation and to find a method based on which quality of translation could be assessed. Every text has a genre and rhetorical mode, and both of them have specific characteristics which every translator must take into account before starting the translation. Therefore in the present study the researcher tried to combine both of these subjects to see if there is any relationship between text rhetorical modes, genre types and translation quality. Waddington’s Model (2001) was used to assess the quality of translation of four texts with religious, legal, technical, and literary genres with explanation, argumentation, exposition and narration rhetorical modes respectively. The texts were translated by 30 students of English Translation major. The analyses revealed that text type and translation quality are related such that among the four texts they delivered the highest quality translation for religious texts. It was concluded that there was a significant difference between the translators perceptions regarding the errors they might had in translation of different texts and their perceptions were lower than average, and also ‘selection of wrong words and equivalents’, ‘source text perception’, ‘addition’, ‘untranslated elements’, ‘grammatical error’, and ‘loan words’ were the problems that occurred in translations of the aforementioned texts.