Literary Translation Quality Assessment

The present study offers a general view of the main approaches to translation quality assessment and its current problems. It aims to contribute to clarifying the most fundamental notions involved in the evaluation of translated literary texts, focusing on the necessity to achieve a systematic and objective practical implementation. The author proposes a literary translation quality assessment analysis and presents it as an effective methodology that might be applied to literary translated texts, as it is argued to be flexible enough to be redefined in order to be adapted to the specific features of each analysis.

The corpus of literary texts analysed includes the seventeen translations of the Spanish picaresque novel El Lazarillo de Tormes into the English language published in Great Britain and in the United States. David Rowland's text (1586), the first translation of El Lazarillo de Tormes into the English language, has been given special prominence; it has been analysed in a more exhaustive way accounting for its noticeable impact on the shaping of English literature. The data collected have enabled the author to arrive at conclusions concerning the quality of the target texts and to verify how the relevance of assessment criteria varies in each analysis.