An-Najah Staff

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to introduce to the reader the question of evaluating a translated text and suggesting a pragmatically-based criterial framework for the assessment of this text, which will mainly address the question of equivalence between S and T texts, its definition, its various kinds and the criteria (intralinguistic and extralinguistic) of measuring its successful achievement in the translated text as evaluation parameters. This framework will be worked out with special reference to House’s model of translation quality assessment (a construct for a systematic investigation of register and situational features) as well as related approaches of Widdowson (focusing on surface equivalence, semantic equivalence and pragmatic equivalence), Nord (focusing on textual function and textual type of a message) Van Dijk (focusing on acceptability of a translated message) , etc. These approaches will be compared and contrasted so that their merits can be shown, and their applicability will be tested through actual examples to verify their value to the practicing translator. After these have been argued and evaluated, illustrative textual examples will be provided to verify their validity. The paper will be concluded with characteristic common features of the approaches reviewed as well as implications and conclusions about the pragmatic evaluation of a translated text.