Quality Assessment of Persian Translation of English Pharmaceutical Leaflets Based on House’s Model

This research attempted to evaluate the quality of Persian translation of drug leaflets. The researchers randomly selected a set of 30 pharmaceutical leaflets collected between March-August, 2015. The leaflets were analyzed based on House’s functional-pragmatic model of translation quality assessment. At first, the profiles of both source texts and target texts were collected. Then, their overtly and covertly erroneous errors and the kinds of strategies used by the translators in translating the pharmaceutical leaflets into Persian were identified. The results indicate that out of 90 selected sentences of English leaflets, 47 were overtly erroneous and 43 were error-free. These overtly erroneous translations had 27 instances of “mistranslation”, 15 instances of “grammatical mistakes”, six instances of “addition”, six instances of “omission” and four instances of “substitution”. The only covert error was “tenor mismatch” in all sample sentences. The study findings can help teachers in translation studies to improve the quality of students’ translation. Moreover, awareness of the errors in the current leaflet translations can assist students in performing their future jobs as translators. The findings may directly and indirectly affect the health of patients in an efficient and effective way.