Assessing the Quality of Idiomatic Expressions in the Persian Translation of Heart of Darkness Based on Nababan’s Threefold Model

چکیده

Assessing the quality of translated works is an essential step in their afterlife process. It enables the translators and publishers to identify flaws and ensures that readers can make informed decisions when selecting a ‘good’ translation. In this study, the focus was on assessing the quality of idiomatic expressions in Saleh Hosseini’s Persian translation of the novel Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad. This particular translation had not been previously evaluated in this regard. To identify idiomatic expressions, Adelnia and Vahid Dastjerdi’s categorization of idiomatic expressions was employed. For quality assessment, Nababan et al.’s Translation Quality Assessment scale was employed, which includes three factors: accuracy, acceptability, and readability. To conduct the research, a sample of idiomatic expressions and their corresponding Persian translations was selected, categorized, and assessed for quality. The results of the study indicated that Saleh Hosseini’s Persian translations of idiomatic expressions enjoyed a high quality as judged by native speakers of Persian because they were evaluated as highly accurate (77%) (faithful to the source text), hence highly acceptable (83%) and highly readable (80%) (loyal to the norms of the target culture). This was based on the assumption that accuracy has a great impact on acceptability and readability.