Translation Quality Assessment

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.

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.

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 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.

In this book the Semiotic Model of translation quality assessment for poetry translation has been applied to the Persian subtitles of three musical movies leading to a model of TQA for the subtitles of such movies and to criteria for the evaluation of Persian subtitles of English movies regarding the omission of the Interpersonal Elements.

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.