MODERN CRITERIA FOR ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF TRANSLATED LITERARY TEXTS AND CHOOSING AN EDITING STRATEGY

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of developing modern criteria for evaluating translated texts and standardizing terminology. It clarifies the understanding of the term «translated text» as a set of linguistic units and means of their combination, as an analogue of the original, its invariant. The translated text is created using the units of another language while considering socio-cultural and linguistic reality, and becomes a mediator of intercultural communication. It is a result of semantic recoding, psychomental comprehension of the world, and a carrier of national and universal culture. Three approaches to evaluating a translated text, common in contemporary translation studies, are described: language-centered, text-centered and communicative-functional. The views of Ukrainian and foreign scholars on the concepts of adequacy and equivalence as indicators of the quality of a translated text are analyzed. Means of achieving maximum equivalence of the translated text at the levels of structural-semantic, textual, and communicative-functional equivalence have been considered. Criteria for assessing the quality of translated literary texts at different linguistic levels (phonetic, lexical-semantic, morphological-word-formation, syntactic, phraseological, textual) have been determined. It has been noted that modern machine translation systems cannot provide adequate quality for translating literary texts, but they can be used for preparing a so called «under-the-line translation». For a relatively objective assessment of quality, it is necessary to develop clear criteria for text equivalence in translation, create multilingual databases of original texts and their translations, as well as electronic databases of interlingual equivalents. It has been emphasized that editing contributes to improving the quality and communicative effectiveness of the translated text. Editing strategies depend on addressing specific challenges in overcoming translation difficulties. The research prospects lie in developing evaluation criteria for literary translations of all genre-stylistic types.