Assessment Issues In Language Translation And Interpreting

The need for reliable and valid assessments of translator and interpreter (T&I) skills has been widely acknowledged inside and outside these professions and the (language) testing community. The focus of the volume is on assessment of T&I leading to authorization, accreditation, registration and certification in different countries of the world.

"Testing and Assessment in Translation and Interpreting Studies" examines issues of measurement that are essential to translation and interpreting. Conceptualizing testing both as a process and a product, the collection of papers explores these issues across languages and settings (including university classrooms, research projects, the private sector, and professional associations). The authors have approached their chapters from different perspectives using a variety of methods, some focusing on very specific variables, and others providing a much broader overview of the issues at hand. Chapters range from a discussion of the measurement of text cohesion in translation; the measurement of interactional competence in interpreting; the use of a particular scale to measure interpreters renditions to the application of a specific approach to grading or general program assessment (such as interpreter or translator certification at the national level or program admissions processes). These studies point to the need for greater integration of research and practice in the specific area of testing and assessment and are a welcome addition to the field."

The development of translation memories and machine translation have led to new quality assurance practices where translators have found themselves checking not only human translation but also machine translation outputs. As a result, the notions of revision and interpersonal competences have gained great importance with international projects recognizing them as high priorities. Quality Assurance and Assessment Practices in Translation and Interpreting is a critical scholarly resource that serves as a guide to overcoming the challenge of how translation and interpreting results should be observed, given feedback, and assessed. It also informs the design of new ways of evaluating students as well as suggesting criteria for professional quality control. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as quality management, translation tests, and competency-based assessments, this book is geared towards translators, interpreters, linguists, academicians, translation and interpreting researchers, and students seeking current research on the new ways of evaluating students as well as suggesting criteria for professional quality control in translation.

This book focuses on new perspectives on assessment in translator and interpreting education and suggests that assessment is not only a measure of learning (i.e. assessment ‘of’ learning) but also part of the learning process (i.e. assessment ‘for’ learning and assessment ‘as’ learning). To this end, the book explores the current and changing practices of the role and nature of assessment not only in terms of the products but also the processes of translation. It includes empirical studies which examine competence-based assessment and quality in translation and interpreting education both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. This includes studies and proposals on formative and summative assessment in a wide range of educational contexts, as well as contributions about relatively unexplored research areas such as quality assurance and assessment in subtitling for the D/deaf and the hard of hearing, and how closely translation programmes fit the reality of professional practice. The findings of this book lend support to existing theoretical frameworks and inform course planning and design in translation education. As such, it will be a valuable resource for translation educators, trainers and researchers, translation and interpreting practitioners and associated professionals. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer.

This book is the first and only dictionary on education and assessment in the context of translator and interpreter training. It offers the reader in-depth and up-to-date knowledge regarding key issues of the education and assessment of translators and interpreters, including how best to train translators and interpreters and how best to assess their performance in pedagogical settings. It contains key terms defined and discussed with a broad focus, and arranged alphabetically. It will serve as a valuable resource for academic researchers, educators, and assessors in translation and interpreting studies, as well as practitioners and students of translation and interpreting studies.

As a research area, education in the fields of translation and interpreting has received growing attention in recent years, with the increasing professionalization of the language-mediation sector demanding ever more highly trained employees with broader repertoires. This trend is evidenced in the present collection, which addresses issues in pedagogy in a variety of translation and interpreting domains. A global range of contributors discuss teaching, evaluation, professionalization and competence as they apply to an array of educational and linguistic situations. Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates presents an in-depth consideration of the issues involved in this area of translation and interpreting studies, and will be of interest to all students and academics working and researching in the field.

This collection brings together new insights around current translation and interpreting practices in national and supranational settings. The book illustrates the importance of further reflection on issues around quality and assessment, given the increased development of resources for translators and interpreters. The first part of the volume focuses on these issues as embodied in case studies from a range of national and regional contexts, including Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United States. The second part takes a broader perspective to look at best practices and questions of quality through the lens of international bodies and organizations and the shifting roles of translation and interpreting practitioners in working to manage these issues. Taken together, this collection demonstrates the relevance of critically examining processes, competences and products in current institutional translation and interpreting settings at the national and supranational levels, paving the way for further research and quality assurance strategies in the field. The Introduction, Chapter 7, and Conclusion of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Topics included in this volume are centered around the politics of translator and interpreter education in higher education in the US as well as in Europe and the perceived image of elitism of these disciplines; other essays discuss the tension and disciplinary boundaries between foreign language training and translator and interpreter education. Topics dealing with specific quality control issues in the teaching of interpreting and translation, discussions of innovative approaches to research, e.g., isotopy and translation, and a review of teaching conference interpreting complete this volume.