Perspectives On Translation Quality

The volume is a collection of papers that deal with the issue of translation quality from a number of perspectives. It addresses the quality of human translation and machine translation, of pragmatic and literary translation, of translations done by students and by professional translators. Quality is not merely looked at from a linguistic point of view, but the wider context of QA in the translation workflow also gets ample attention. The authors take an inductive approach: the papers are based on the analysis of translation data and/or on hands-on experience. The book provides a bird's eye view of the crucial quality issues, the close collaboration between academics and industry professionals safeguarding attention for quality in the 'real world'. For this reason, the methodological stance is likely to inspire the applied researcher. The analyses and descriptions also include best practices for translation trainers, professional translators and project managers.

This book offers a theoretical framework for assessing translation quality grounded in supportive argumentation. The volume outlines a systematic framework for translators and translation critics to substantiate their decisions and judgments on a translation’s quality and in the case of negative criticism, put forward a more effective translation solution. The book traces the decision-making process underpinning translation practice, considering the different factors surrounding a particular translation to inform the most appropriate translation strategy, such as the temporal and geographical relationship between source and target texts, special provisions required by clients, timeframe, qualifications, and sociocultural and political issues. The framework posits that such factors should underpin any arguments used by the translator in adopting a given strategy and in turn, that any criticism of a translation’s quality must be in line with the same argumentative structure. Applied to a corpus of translation examiners’ reports of translation, the book demonstrates how this framework can act as a tool to be scaled to fit the needs of the different actors of a translation – translators, critics, and scholars. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies and practicing translators.

Outlining an original, discourse-based model for translation quality assessment that goes beyond conventional microtextual error analysis, this ground-breaking new work by Malcolm Williams explores the potential of transferring reasoning and argument as the prime criterion of translation quality. Assessment through error analysis is inevitably based on an error count - an unsatisfactory means of establishing, and justifying, differences in quality that forces the evaluator to focus on subsentence elements rather than on the translator's success in conveying the key messages of the source text. Williams counters that a judgement of translation quality should be based primarily on the degree to which the translator has adequately rendered the reasoning, or argument structure. An assessment of six aspects of argument structure is proposed: argument macrostructure, propositional functions, conjunctives, types of arguments, figures of speech, and narrative strategy. Williams illustrates the approach using.

This is the first volume that brings together research and practice from academic and industry settings and a combination of human and machine translation evaluation. Its comprehensive collection of papers by leading experts in human and machine translation quality and evaluation who situate current developments and chart future trends fills a clear gap in the literature. This is critical to the successful integration of translation technologies in the industry today, where the lines between human and machine are becoming increasingly blurred by technology: this affects the whole translation landscape, from students and trainers to project managers and professionals, including in-house and freelance translators, as well as, of course, translation scholars and researchers. The editors have broad experience in translation quality evaluation research, including investigations into professional practice with qualitative and quantitative studies, and the contributors are leading experts in their respective fields, providing a unique set of complementary perspectives on human and machine translation quality and evaluation, combining theoretical and applied approaches.

This volume offers a selection of issues currently encountered by scholars working within the broadly understood discipline of Translation Studies. The contributions here discuss topical and recurrent issues, which have long been at the forefront of this discipline, such as phraseology, corpora, quality of interpreting, translator training, censorship, style, proper names, and receptor-oriented translation. In addition, they also deal with relatively recent developments, such as humour and multimodality in audiovisual translation, and those problems rarely conclusively addressed in the context of translation, namely impoliteness and paratexts. Bringing together authors from eight countries, namely the UK, Spain, Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, the USA and New Zealand, the volume offers research into translation from a variety of methodological solutions and conducted across eight languages (English, Spanish, Catalan, Polish, German, Italian, Chinese and Greek). Despite the diversity of themes presented, the main research areas emerging from all the contributions fall into four thematic groups: (1) lexicological issues and corpora in translation studies; (2) quality and translator training; (3) audiovisual translation; and (4) literary translation.

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.

Outlining an original, discourse-based model for translation quality assessment that goes beyond conventional microtextual error analysis, Malcolm Williams explores the potential of transferring reasoning and argument as the prime criterion of translation quality. Assessment through error analysis is inevitably based on an error count - an unsatisfactory means of establishing, and justifying, differences in quality that forces the evaluator to focus on subsentence elements rather than the key messages of the source text. Williams counters that a judgment of translation quality should be based primarily on the success with which the translator has rendered the reasoning, or argument structure. Six aspects for assessment are proposed: argument macrostructure, propositional functions, conjunctives, types of arguments, figures of speech, and narrative strategy. Williams illustrates the approach using three different types of examples: letters, statistical reports, and argumentative articles for publication. Translation Quality Assessment offers translators a new set of flexible and modular standards.

The purpose of this volume is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretical background for discussing quality on the one hand, and chapters exploring selected aspects of quality and case studies from both academics and practitioners on the other. Our aim is to present these two approaches as a breeding ground for testing one vis-à-vis the other. This book studies institutional translation mostly through the lens of the European Union (EU) reality, and, more specifically, of EU institutions and bodies, due to the unprecedented scale of their multilingual operations and the legal and political importance of translation. Thus, it is concerned with the supranational (international) level, deliberately leaving national and other contexts aside. Quality in supranational institutions is explored both in terms of translation processes and their products – the translated texts.