Examining the Appropriateness of Reiss’s Functionalist-oriented Approach to Trancism

Abstract

Trancism is an activity that is put into Holmes’ (1972) applied branch of Translation Studies (TS). The aim of trancism is to make a fair judgment to help improve the translation through the constructive comments provided by the critic. Various approaches have been proposed to achieve an objective judgment in order to avoid making a subjective judgment. The present study investigated the appropriateness of Reiss’s (2000) approach to the critique of a translation. To do end, the English version of Rowling's (2000) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and its Persian translation were chosen as the corpus of the present study to evaluate the Persian translation on the basis of three categories included in Reiss’s model of trancism. This encompasses literary, language, and pragmatic categories. As the results indicated, the translator was successful in accomplishing her translation at almost all levels, except some part of grammatical and punctuation included in language category in which the translation she produced resulted in failure to some extent. In conclusion, Reiss’s functionalist approach was mostly appropriate to the critique of a translated text, especially expressive text types, because her model allows the critic to judge two main aspect of the translation: linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects.