A Comparative Quality Assessment of Two English Translations of Ghazaliyat of Hafez Using House’s Model

The present research studied two translations of Hafez’s Ghazaliyat: one in prose by John Slater, Jeffrey Einboden, and the other in rhymed prose by Manavaz Alexandrian. House’s Translation Quality Assessment model concerning overt and covert errors was adapted in this assessment. In this regard, the commonly translated poetry of two translators (14 poems) was compared. To prepare the overt errors tables, each verse was initially understood through the interpretation of the book Sharh-e Shoq by Hamidian (2011) and then compared with the two translations to detect the errors. The study also extracted the covert errors by deeply analyzing both profiles of the source and target texts. The findings revealed that the two translations were not very different in terms of quality. Nevertheless, the first one was somehow closer to covert translation because it did not make any additional rhyme contrary to Alexandrian.