Meaning-oriented Assessment of English-Persian Translated Texts

Systematic assessment of translation is a major concern for translation teachers, students and even translators themselves. Out of different types of assessment, the formative approach is a crucial element which plays a significant role in translator training in an academic context. Among different approaches, this study opted for meaning-oriented translation assessment as its point of departure to address the issue following Mira Kim (2009) and her proposed systemic functional linguistics (SFL) based translation assessment method through text analysis. Kim (2009) states that SFL can be looked upon as a great wealth in the area of translation assessment as it “theorizes the correlation between grammar, semantics, and register”. Drawing on notions from translation studies (skopos theory, overt and covert translation, cultural filter, etc.) she (2003, 2007a, 2009) discusses the feasibility of using SFL-based text analysis to classify students’ translation errors (major and minor) into different modes of meaning to come up with some assessment criteria trying to minimize rater subjectivity and helping students remain aloof from teacher’s idiosyncratic stances and personal tastes. The aim of the present study was to figure out the applicability and pedagogical effectiveness of the method to English-Persian translation assessment. To do this, after a review of Kim’s work, her method was applied to assess sample Persian-English translated texts analyzed based on SFL notions and then the data were analyzed to explore the underlying nuances.