ANTHEMS AS PROPAGANDA: A DISCOURSAL TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT

Translation of works of aesthetic and literary value particularly anthems has been one of the thought-provoking and serious areas in translation studies. Anthem as one of the techniques of propaganda transmission is a formal song of loyalty, praise, or happiness and a song that is important to a particular group of people. This paper assesses the quality of two English-Persian translations of the anthems in Orwell’s Animal Farm based on House’s revised discoursal model. Accordingly, a literary work has to be translated overtly, to be realized as an adequate translation, and any deviation from it would be considered as an error. First the professional profiles of the translators were analyzed to find out the expert and novice translators based on Dimitrova’s notion of ‘expertise in translation’. Second the profiles of the source text and the two translations were analyzed on four different levels: function of the individual text, genre, register (field, mode and tenor), and language/text. Two types of errors were discussed: the covertly and overtly erroneous errors. Finally conclusions were drawn to find out whether the expert or novice translator’s translation is more or less adequate. The findings of the study revealed that expert performance does not always result in superior performance.