Met Het Oog op Vertalingen: Een empirisch onderzoek naar 'functionele' fouten in vertaalde teksten

After studying the functional model for translation quality assessment created by Hulst (1995) and primarily aimed at revealing textual relations, we addressed the question whether this model would enable us to define 'functional' errors, i.e. errors that obscure the textual relations in such a way that the text function cannot be understood properly. To find an answer to this question, two Spanish texts were analysed according to the method of text analysis of Hulst's model, and subsequently, 26 Dutch translations were broadly analysed. A systematic comparison of the translation errors with the analyses of the source texts demonstrated that errors causing changes in textual relations nearly always reduce the comprehensibility of the text, while other mistakes do not cause misunder-standing. Hence, the research has demonstrated that in fact a distinction can be made between 'functional' and 'non-functional' errors, and the criterion for such a classification is not the type of error, but its effect on the textual relations. An investigation among Dutch readers of the translations has convincingly confirmed this conclusion.