Translation Quality Assessment of Non-Literary Translation: Comparing Two Arabic Translations of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Edward Said’s groundbreaking and influential Orientalism has been translated into more than thirty languages, among which is Arabic. Kamal Abu Deeb, the poet and critic, and Mohammed Enani, the professor of English, produced the Arabic translations of Said’s Orientalism with noticeably different translational choices. This thesis attempts to apply a translation criticism approach to the two Arabic translations of Orientalism with an overall aim of evaluating the quality of these translations. Specifically speaking, the current thesis applies Reiss’s (2000) three-category translation criticism approach to Abu Deeb’s ([1981] 2003) and Enani’s (2006) Arabic translations of Edward Said’s ([1978] 1995) Orientalism. The question I address is to what extent the differences in translational choices between the two translations of the same non-literary source text could assist in evaluating the quality of those translations. To this end, I compare and analyse the two translations based on the three categories of Reiss’s (2000) translation criticism approach including text typology, linguistic components and extra-linguistic determinants (pragmatics). The results show differences in translational choices with regard to linguistic components and pragmatics which stem from the translators’ different motives and approaches of translation. While these differences might impact conveying the appeal of the source text in the target text, they hardly assist in evaluating the quality of the two translations. Moreover, while Reiss’s (2000) translation criticism approach aids in providing a qualitative analysis to the two translations, it suggests no specific criteria for evaluating the quality of translation.