Critique and Quality Assessment of the English Translation of Selected Short Stories Drawn from Contemporary Arabic Literature

Literary translation, among other types of translation, projects a lot of challenges for translators especially those dealing with disparate languages like Arabic and English. This study evaluates the quality of English translations of two Arabic short stories Mother of the Destitute and The Death of Bed Number 12 by Denys Johnson-Davies. Using House’s (2015) Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) model, the study investigates how accurately the translations reproduce the linguistic, pragmatic, and cultural features of the source texts. The selected works were written by two Arabic writers and novelist, the Egyptian writer Yahya Haqqi and the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. In the process of comparing ST with TT, errors are identified and categorized as overt and covert errors. Overtly erroneous errors included denotative mismatches and target system errors. The translations were further categorized into two types: overt translation or covert translation. The related overt errors were categorized into seven categories: not translated, slight change of meaning, significant change of meaning, distortion of meaning, breach of the target language system, creative translation and cultural filtering. Since any deviation from the Translation Quality Assessment paradigm is considered unacceptable. The present study focuses on evaluating literary works that have undergone overt translation. The findings show some mismatches primarily resulting from cultural filtering. The translator somehow prioritized achieving comparability in the target text rather than maintaining faithfulness to the culture, community and language of the ST. The study concluded that House’s model    proves practical and effective in assessing the translations from Arabic into English