Quality Assessment of English-into-Persian Translations of Tourism Management Academic Textbooks

This paper addresses the quality of the Persian translations of 32 English tourism textbooks. The quality was assessed at sentence-level and page-level by the researchers and from the viewpoint of a tourism management student. In Phase 1, the quality of one randomly selected sentence from each textbook was assessed applying Hurtado Albir’s analytical model; two were acceptable and 30 unacceptable. The dominant error types according to her model were also identified. In Phase 2, the quality of one randomly selected page from each textbook was assessed applying Waddington’s Method C, which is a holistic model; on average, the quality proved to be inadequate. In phase 3, the opinion of one end-user regarding the overall quality of the translation of six sentences and six pages from the whole corpus was elicited. To her, the overall quality was adequate at the sentence-level and inadequate at the page-level. It can be concluded that the quality of the translated textbooks is unacceptable and that they fail to serve the intended purpose.