Translation quality assessment : Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley as case study

This thesis is a descriptive, evaluative and comparative study in the field of translation studies. One of the objectives for this thesis is to explore a valid criterion by which a literary translation can be evaluated efficiently and to assess the translation of the selected novel for this research. The aim of this study is to measure the shifts which occurred between TTl and TT2 when compared to the ST. The thesis also aims at highlighting the significance of culture and the way cultures are introduced to the Tar et readership through translation. It is thought that the strategy of Foreignization enriches target texts and introduces cultural elements to the target reader. The corpus of the study is Ziqiiq Al Midaq the well-known novel by Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature in 1988. This novel has been first translated by Trevor Le Gassick in 1966 and a revision of this translation was published in 1975. The main objective of this study is to explore the translation shifts which were applied in TTl and TT2. The methodology of this thesis relies on the Nord Model (2005). It focuses on the translation problems introduced by Nord. The four aspects of translation problems Nord identifies are Pragmatic, linguistic, cultural and text-specific translation problems. A final assessment of the quality of both versions of translation is discussed at the end of the study.