Assessing translation quality

English-language reviews of translations of prose fiction are dominated by a “belletristic” approach whereby the artistic features of the translation text are assessed with little reference to its original. Such an approach fails to provide an adequate evaluation of the merits, drawbacks or “losses” in the translation under review. The author of the article offers a method of concrete comparative translation discourse analysis (CTDA) of originals and their translations based on their specific lexical, structural-communicative, stylistic, pragmatic, and sociocultural properties. At the lexical level, the objects of comparison of the original text and its translation are the following elements of denotative and connotative meaning: denotation - (1) denotative word-sense core; (2) denotative word-sense periphery; connotation - the “emotive charge” of the sense core, including (3) the nature of emotion and (4) its intensity; (5) the evaluative connotation of the word-sense (“the author’s attitude”); (6) functional style reference; (7) dialectal reference (temporal/generational, regional, and sociocultural); (8) comparative frequency of occurrence in a particular functional style; (9) word-sense pragmatics (word-sense comparative “metaphoricity,” its “political correctness,” “cumbersomeness” and some other features). At the predication level (sentence and clause), it is possible to single out 5-7 key (constant) syntactic and communicative “discrepancies” between Russian and English, which get rendered in either language with the help of 5-7 constant translation models. The assessment of the overall pragmatics of the translation text consists in determining the degrees of the neutralization, “domestication” (“naturalization”/localization), “contamination,” “foreignization,” and stylization of the original text. The comprehensive “impression” of the quality of a translation in the mind of the translation analyst, based on the analyses at the three levels (lexical, predication, and pragmatic), constitutes the tertium comparationis of the proposed analytical approach. Given the relative “fuzziness” and variance in individual perceptions of textual meaning, the categories of analysis and assessment proposed in this article are not absolute, belonging as they do to the qualitative methods of comparative translation studies. The article contains examples illustrating the author’s conceptual framework.