ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a brief overview of different approaches and practices in the field of translation quality assessment and gives some space to author's own assessment model. It reviews various approaches that are explicitly or implicitly related to translation evaluation. The chapter considers Mentalist views which are reflected in the century-old, intuitive and anecdotal judgements of 'how good or how bad somebody finds a translation'. What sets the overt-covert distinction made in the assessment model apart from other similar distinctions is the fact that it is part of a coherent theory of translation quality assessment inside which the origin and function of the two types of translation are theoretically motivated and consistently explicated. The distinction between overt and covert translation can be given greater explanatory adequacy by relating it to the concepts of frame and discourse world. However, we deal with overt manifestations of cultural phenomena that are transferred only because they happen to be manifest linguistically in the original.
