ABSTRACT
Evaluators’ approaches to quality generally reflect their own views on translation and explicitly or implicitly presuppose a theory of translation, which means that “different views of translation lead to different concepts of translational quality, and hence different ways of assessing quality”. Despite much interest and numerous studies, translation quality remains a controversial topic, as discussed in publications such as Hague et al., Colina and House, among others. Much of the criticism levelled against various approaches to quality assessment and evaluation concerns their dependence on the concept of equivalence, which is as difficult to define as translation itself. Reader-response approaches evaluate quality by determining whether readers respond to the translation in the same way as readers of the source text respond to the original. The basic measure of quality is that the textual profile and function of the translation must match those of the original, the goal being functional equivalence between the original and the translation.
