Translating Religious Terms and Culture: A model for Quality Assessment

House’s (1977 1997 2015) model for translation quality assessment has been developed and approved to be applicable to assess covert translations. This book introduces modifications to the model to assess House’s other type of translation i.e. overt translations. Its focus is a key cultural text: the Arabic- English translation of the biography of Prophet Muhammad entitled The Sealed Nectar. In order to enhance the model the book introduces a consilience of: 1) Nord’s (1997) notion of culturemes; 2) Nida’s (1975) categorization of cultural features; 3) Dickins et al.’s (2002) compensation strategies; 4) Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory; and 5) Katan’s (2004) model of cultural frames. Application of the enhanced model reveals mismatches on all the discourse variables (field mode and tenor) which indicate the application of a cultural filter that adopts the norms of English academic discourse in addition to overt errors that distort the message of such sensitive text. This book thus complements House’s framework of translation quality assessment and introduces a model that can be further applied to assess overt translations.