Quality Assessment of the Persian Translation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men Based on Waddington’s Model of Translation: Application of Method A

Considering the statement that errors can affect the quality of translations, the need to adopt an objective model to analyze these errors has been one of the most debated issues in translation quality assessment. In recent decades, some objective models have emerged with an error analysis nature according to which evaluators can make decisions on the quality of translations. In this study, Method (A) of Waddington's model (2001) was applied on the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937) and translated by Parviz Daryuosh in 1966. To this end, 20 paragraphs were chosen at random, then compared and contrasted thoroughly with their translations to evaluate the quality of translation. By close examination of the data, the kinds of errors were detected and tabulated according to the number of frequency and percentage. The results of the study revealed that almost all extents of Waddington's model (method A) could be applied on the novel. Furthermore, the values of the statistical analysis showed that out of the total of 270 errors, the most frequent errors went to the first category of the model with 232 errors accounted for 85.92%, and affected comprehension in the source text. The most frequent errors related to this category were fauxsens, omission, addition and loss of meaning and the rest of errors were not significant. In contrast, the least dominant errors were related to the second category with 38 errors accounted for 14.07%, and affected the expression of the target text. The most frequently occurred error related to this category was grammar and the other errors were not significant.