The Differences between Direct and Indirect Translation: An assessment of two translations of the Japanese novel Black Rain

Although indirect translation (translating a translated text) has always been a common practice in literary translations and other types of translation, it has only recently gained attention as a subject of study in the field of translation studies. The present paper attempts to shed light on the differences between direct and indirect literary translation by analyzing translations of the Japanese novel, Black Rain as a case study. There are two different translations of this novel into Persian; a direct one from Japanese and an indirect one from Russian. Juliane House’s translation quality assessment model (House, 1997; 2001; 2015) was used to compare the two translations. The main findings show that the direct translation was a relatively overt translation, transferring cultural elements from the source language (SL) to the target language (TL), while the indirect translation used “cultural filters” to make cultural compensations for SL cultural phenomena in TL. Furthermore, House divides translation errors into two groups, namely, overt and covert errors. The analysis revealed that there were no covert errors in the direct translation, while the indirect translation contained a covert error. House further divides overt errors into ‘mismatches of the denotative meanings of elements of the source and translation texts’ and ‘breach of the target language system’. The former were much more frequent in the indirect translation, while the latter were slightly more frequent in the direct translation.