Quality In Professional Translation

This book questions the prevalent assumption that ethnicity and nationalist politics had nothing to do with the Cold War and that, far from being 'frozen' until the fall of communism, they remained central to the conflict in Europe. Leading scholars bring their understanding of particular regions to bear on the wider issue of why ethnic explanations were written out of the discourse and whether this was a failure on the part of Western observers. This in turn has led to an overly simple understanding of power flowing downwards, from superpower to nation state and from state to society. Engaging with key thinkers such as Gaddis, Moynihan and Adam Roberts this collection ultimately allows such speculation to be replaced by historical research and bridges the gap between 'high politics' and ethnic concerns.

How do translation companies, multilingual international organizations and individual translators measure and improve the quality of their translations? This book reports on the range of approaches to quality assurance across the translation industry, from Norway to China, from the individual freelance working in a home office to the largest translation supplier in the world. Best practice is outlined for a range of translation scenarios, enabling readers to learn from others' experience - and mistakes. The author also draws on over a decade's experience to outline the potential to improve quality by exploiting modern technological support tools such as translation memory software. New and experienced translators will gain understanding of what employers expect (and reward); translation companies can learn how their peers and rivals manage this sensitive area of their work; clients will find out what levels of quality they can expect; and academics are provided with an illuminating insight into how quality is assessed and guaranteed in the profession today.

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 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.

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.

What does it take to be a professional translator in the 21st century? What are the opportunities and challenges of a career in translation? How do you find that first job? How do you ensure that work remains sustainable over time? Combining industry insights, the latest research in the field of translation studies and a career coaching approach, this textbook takes aspiring translators on an explorative journey that helps them answer these questions for themselves so they can become the professional translators they aspire to be. Each chapter of this hands-on guide opens with key questions that budding translators might typically ask themselves and encourages them to reflect on their relevance for their own situation through regular discussion points and ‘Topics for discussion and assignments’. Targeted suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter guide users in deepening their knowledge. Written primarily for students on translation courses, the accessible language, tone and design of this book will appeal to anyone who is thinking of embarking upon a career in translation. Additional resources are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal.

Translation Quality Assessment has become one of the key issues in translation studies. This comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of translation evaluation makes explicit the grounds of judging the worth of a translation and emphasizes that translation is, at its core, a linguistic art. Written by the author of the world’s best known model of translation quality assessment, Juliane House provides an overview of relevant contemporary interdisciplinary research on intercultural communication and globalization research, corpus and psycho- and neurolinguistic studies. House also acknowledges the importance of socio-cultural and situational context in which texts are embedded, and which need to be analysed when they are transferred through space and time in acts of translation but also highlights the linguistic art form of translation. The text includes a newly revised and presented model of translation quality assessment which, like its predecessor, relies on detailed textual and culturally informed contextual analysis and comparison. The test cases also show that there are two steps in translation evaluation: firstly analysis, description and explanation; secondly, judgements of value, socio-cultural relevance and appropriateness. The second is futile without the first: to judge is easy, to understand less so. Translation Quality Assessment is an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication, as well as for professional translators.