Translation Quality Assessment Research Papers (original) (raw)

The quality of translation either as a product or as a process enjoys a great deal of importance in translation studies. Some people believe the goal of every single translation is to produce a “good” translation. But what is a “good” translation? There are different Translation Quality Assessment Models (TQAM), each has its own novel ideas and methods but Juliane House’s Model is a promising one. This model is applied to “That Evening Sun” by William Faulkner and its Persian translation “Ey Aftabe Ghorubgah” by Ahmad Golshiri. This study aims at determining the quality of translation of the above-mentioned story and applicability of House’s model to literary works. As house hypothesized this is a timeless literary work thus it has to have an overt kind of translation. Analyzing the collected data reveal that the translator adopted mainly a covert translation.

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- Translation Studies, Translation criticism, Translation Quality Assessment

Translators need to submit their translation projects after getting them controlled as per the requirements imposed by the relevant quality standards while translation volumes are increasing and turnaround times are getting shorter in today's setting. This being the case, Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools, which are also known as Translator's Workbench, have become an integral part of most translation projects. Implications of this are seen in the qualifications required from translators. The professional translation industry seeks candidates that are knowledgeable about translation technologies, open to digital developments and that can use these developments during the translation process. As being institutions where the translation is taught at an institutional level, translation departments are playing a significant role in transferring these qualifications to translation students. The professional translation industry attaches importance to compliance to professional quality standards including ISO 17100, EN 15038, LISA QA and SAE J2450 and maintaining translation workflow as per these standards. Furthermore, the translation industry uses linguistic quality assessment tools including TAUS Dynamic Quality Framework and Multidimensional Quality Metrics. Computer-Aided Tools present two functions including instant quality checks and linguistic quality assessment features. The relevant literature shows that the scope of these features is limited compared to the above-mentioned professional quality standards and these features consider translation, not a process but a product. However, it is thought that teaching these functions to translation students who have not jumped into professional life yet is an important step towards reaching professional standards. For this reason, this study aims to touch on the Quality Assurance (QA) checks provided by CAT tools and investigate the implications of these functions for translator training.

Modern American TV-series like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and The Big Bang Theory have become immensely popular over the past few years, and thanks to streaming-services like HBO and Netflix they are more accessible than ever before. The mobility of on-demand TV enables viewers to watch their favorite content where they want, and when they want. Through affordable price plans and vast archives of content, the streaming-services have revolutionized the way we perceive entertainment. This has caused a significant rise in the demand of online content that need subtitling. However, the digital world has caught up with the TV and the subtitling industry, and thusly machine translation, piecework wages, and limited resources are causing a steady decline in the quality of the subtitles.
By consulting the theoretical frameworks of leading scholars within the field of audiovisual translation studies such as Henrik Gottlieb, Anne Schjoldager, Kirsten Marie Øveraas, and Jan Pedersen, this thesis aims to investigate how new models of quality assessment in subtitling can be employed in the everyday routines of subtitlers to ensure the rise in demands does not cause an ongoing decline in the quality of subtitles, but through awareness and pragmatic trouble shooter tools ensure a stabilization in the quality level of subtitles available to viewers. By introducing a categorized taxonomy of the various subtitling errors found in different TV-series, along with consulting the quality assessment of Jan Pedersen’s FAR model, this thesis aspire to provide new and perhaps seasoned subtitlers with a “no-nonsense guide” to quality subtitling, and perhaps a way for the industry to ensure more stable and remunerative business plans in the future.

Recent developments in standardisation with interesting prospects for legal translators.

En los últimos años, han surgido varios proyectos en los que la traducción de la Wikipedia se emplea como herramienta didáctica en la formación de traductores . En la Universitat Jaume I de Castellón (España), en la asignatura de traducción inversa de tercer curso del Grado en Traducción e Interpretación, los alumnos traducen artículos de la Wikipedia del español (lengua A) al inglés (lengua B), en el marco del proyecto WIKITRAD/WIKITRANS que viene desarrollándose desde hace varios años en dicha titulación. A través de esta actividad formativa, el alumnado desarrolla una serie de destrezas clave para su futura profesión, al tiempo que contribuye a un proyecto con una repercusión en la sociedad, dado que los artículos traducidos se publican en la Wikipedia en lengua inglesa. El hecho de que las traducciones serán leídas por un público global sirve como motivación para los alumnos y les da la sensación de realizar una aportación positiva al mundo real, más allá de los límites del aula. Después de ofrecer una breve descripción del proyecto, este capítulo se centrará en la siguiente fase, es decir, en lo que se puede aprender de la (pos)edición de los artículos por parte de los wikipedistas, la red de voluntarios que contribuyen a la Wikipedia. La corrección y mejora continua constituyen una parte intrínseca del principio de la colaboración abierta (Levine & Prietula, 2014) en el que se basa la Wikipedia, y los cambios lingüísticos y estilísticos introducidos por colaboradores en todo el mundo pueden servir como fuente de retroalimentación para el alumnado.

- by Kim Schulte
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- Translation, Wikipedia Studies, Translation Quality Assessment, Translator Training

Il presente volume intende fornire un modello traduttivo utilizzabile tanto in ambito professionale quanto in ambito pedagogico, al fine di permettere lo sviluppo di strategie utili alla traduzione di diverse tipologie testuali. Il filo conduttore del volume sarà dunque la discussione del modello sistematico, interdisciplinare e sequenziale proposto in apertura di volume, che verrà analizzato nei suoi vari aspetti teorici e pratici nelle rimanenti sezioni. Le analisi svolte all’ interno dei vari capitoli e le attività proposte (affiancate dall’ introduzione succinta dell’impianto teorico di riferimento), si riveleranno così utili a qualsiasi lettore intenzionato ad approfondire il discorso della “traduzione”, offrendo un utile strumento che possa favorire la realizzazione di traduzioni di qualità.

As an interactive media, fanbases of localised games can have a substantial effect on the localisation choices made by each team of translators. Thanks to the advent of the Internet and social media, gamers have the ability to participate in online discussions about localisation, often directly with the translators involved in the translation itself, and therefore translators are always very aware of the needs of their intended audience, and make choices about the translation of cultural concepts with these specific fandom expectancy norms in mind. The main questions that this study aims to discuss include: are the target-audience expectancy norms for Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) influenced by fandom culture, and how does this affect the reception of their localisations? Using online discourse and focus groups, this case study explores this in reference to the localisation decisions made in Persona 5, a JRPG with a niche fandom and polarising localisation reception amongst critics and fans alike. Excerpts from the localisation were analysed both functionally and in reference to the perceived expectancy norms and real norms of the participants. The findings indicated that members of the fandom are more critical of Japanese-English translations because of their prior knowledge of the language and culture, though their perceived norms differed from their real expectations when exposed to actual excerpts from the translation.

Chinese traditional wedding is a marriage ceremony established with a pre-arrangement between families involving a ritual procession. In this respect, this study deals with the semiotics translation of Chinese traditional wedding signs in the ritual processions located in Medan.The aims of this research are: to analyse the types of semiotics displayed in the Hokkien Chinese Traditional Wedding signs, to translate the semiotics of each sign Chinese traditional wedding in Medan realized in English, and to discuss the cultural value in the semiotics translation of Hokkien Chinese Traditional Wedding in Medan. The research focuses on the semiotics meanings of Chinese traditional wedding signs in Medan, North Sumatra, by the community of Hokkien. The study employed a qualitative research design. Interview and documentations were used as the data collection methods. The research results showed that: there are thirty signs of Hokkien Chinese Traditional Weddings discussed in this research consisting of semiotics meanings which influenced and gave an effect to the bride and groom in their wedding, the tradition that has been practiced consisted of the cultural category of ecology culture, material culture, social culture, organization culture, gesture, and habit culture in which the most dominant one was the social culture. Based on these, it was concluded that all of the signs used in Chinese traditional wedding for the pre-wedding and wedding ritual were in hereditary from generation to generation, though some modifications had been made.

The ever-changing translation market requires translation degree programmes to prepare students for a flexible reaction to unpredictable changes in demand for language services. A maximum of demand-oriented flexibility entails translators' capability to add new working languages in a timely manner as need arises.
Against this background, this thesis proposes a methodology for language instruction in translator training based on intercomprehension, which refers to the innate ability to (partially) comprehend unfamiliar languages without having them acquired previously. Research into third or additional language acquisition has repeatedly shown that intercomprehension may serve as the point of departure for the time-saving acquisition of receptive skills across closely related languages. In application to translator training, intercomprehension-based language instruction yields great potential for the design of modular elective language courses that enable would-be translators to efficiently exploit their existing linguistic knowledge and skills for the addition of passive working languages.
Centring around the assumption that translation competence involves a series of metalinguistic skills that are transferable to any language combination, the theoretical part of this thesis elaborates on the cognitive foundations of the integration of intercomprehension-based language instruction with translator training and presents the methodology with reference to two courses of this type held within the MA programme in Translation Studies at the University of Innsbruck. In the empirical part, data from these two courses are provided in support of the feasibility of this didactic approach. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis of intercomprehension-based translation processes is presented.

- by Maria Kunilovskaya
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- Learner corpora, Translation Quality Assessment

Google Translate (GT), as a free web-based translation application-automation, has made it possible to actualize translation exercise with a degree of sophistication, accuracy, speed and minimum effort. However, Google Translate was casually and technically criticized by the major stakeholders (author, translator and target audience and researchers in translation activity) for being unintelligible, inaccurate, and contextually incoherent. It is against this backdrop, that this empirical research analysed, evaluated and compared the qualities of translations (accuracy, comprehensibility, equivalence) and incongruities of Google Translate English-French with Human Expert Translations (HET), using a heterogeneous based corpus. The corpus adopted is a collection of text excerpts ranging from politics, diplomacy, justice, health, literature and religion. The research applied descriptive and analytical methods such as Nida’s (1964) Behaviourist Approach and House’s (2015) Models of Translation Quality Assessment (TQA). Subject to these methods were our analysis and evaluation of text- types translated by Human Expert Translator (HET) as well as Google Translate (GT), and the respondents’ views culled from the questionnaire administered. Our findings revealed that most critics of Google Translate often failed to substantiate their arguments with empirical evidence. In addition, the study showed that unedited Google Translate (GT) performs exceedingly well in the translation of pragmatic texts and therefore, remained faithful to the source texts at almost the same high performance index with a Human Expert Translator. In terms of literary and religious texts, Google Translate fared amazingly well in spite of the intrinsic nuances, socio-cultural, and problematic nature of the texts. Furthermore, the study maintained that Google Translate has heightened to a large extent its translation capabilities and performance index of variegated texts in European languages particularly English-French even though there are negligible traces of lexico-semantic, syntactic and context-dependent inadequacies. The study observed that Google Translate has become a sine qua non for the 21st Century translator. Thus, an expert translator who is not ICT compliant is arguably threatened in the field, by the preponderance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which simulates human cognitive skills. The study, therefore, recommended that: (i) Google Translate should be used by contemporary translators who wish to remain relevant in the profession, (ii) the identified deficiencies of Google Translate (GT) should be considered negligible to optimally embrace and improve on its benefits and potentials because post-edited Google Translate productions measure up to Human Expert translations.

- by Rasaq Thomas, PhD
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- Translation Quality Assessment

In spite of the professionalization of translators and their central role in international relations, there is yet no widely accepted methodology available for professional Translation Quality Assessment (TQA). At the same time, there exists a pressing need to standardize TQA criteria to mitigate the subjectivity prevailing over quality assessment. Evaluating the quality of a translation first requires defining concepts of Quality and Translation, which inevitably parallels the approach characteristic of a translation theory (House, 1997). In this case, the functionalist approach is embraced. The aim of this article is to review the Quality Assessment Tool (QAT), a computer-aid tool developed by the Directorate General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission as an aid in the quality quantification process of external translations. Simultaneously, some of the most representative quantitative models for TQA are analyzed with a view to lay the foundations to develop an alternative model that improves the QAT. I begin by analyzing a selection of outstanding quantitative-oriented models of TQA (metrics), identifying their strengths and weaknesses as viable and efficient assessment tools. Having surveyed these models, I then propose suitable forms for refinement and for the polishing of existing metrics so as to establish a basis for the structuring of a new theoretical model for TQA. The result is a mixed approach to TQA that takes up an integrated view embedding both top-down (rubrics) and bottom-up (metrics) tools.

- by Roberto Martínez Mateo
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- Translation Quality Assessment

There is a large presence of translators without formal education in the Slovene market, partly because until the 1990s there were no independent translation programs, but also because of the popular notion that anybody who speaks a foreign language well, or has a degree in it, can translate. In this paper we present a comparison of four B.A. programs at the University of Ljubljana (in three foreign language departments and one department of translation) to shed light on what knowledge and competences are expected at the end of the B.A. studies, and to find out whether these departments actually train people to be translators. The paper also reports the results of a translation quality assessment of third-year students of those departments, who were given the task of translating a text into their L1. The students approached the task in different ways and produced very different results, which indicates that language competences alone are not enough for translation, and that specific additional instruction can give them a considerable advantage at the beginning of their careers.

- by Tamara Mikolic Juznic and +2
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- Translation Studies, Translation Competence, Teaching of Foreign Languages, Translation pedagogy

This paper provides an overview of the Translation Quality Index (TQI), a measurement methodology that can be used as a reliable indicator of translation quality. The authors have been developing the TQI methodology for the past five... more

We live in a world which is globalized and where international relations are much more active than ever. As people do not speak common language, need for translation and interpreting is more crucial in this regard. We cannot think of close contacts among states, societies, people and businesses without the mediation of translation and interpreting than before. Thus, translation and interpreting have became crucial and are playing a very important role in human interactions. International law, which regulates relations between organizations and states, has also gained importance. Thus, it can be said that international law (as a result of this translation and interpreting as well) has also become more crucial. Thus, legal translation has also become important among the other domains of translation. However, translating and interpreting are not easy at all. There is no room for error in translation and interpreting as legal consequences may follow. Legal translation involves very complex matters and specialized terminology. This is why it is extremely important to assign the legal translation task to a translator who is well qualified and specialized to handle translation of legal documents. The field of legal translation in Kosovo is not so much developed. There is a limited work and study done in this regard. Therefore, this paper attempts to make a modest contribution in this regard with description and discussion of the issues regarding translation of legal texts. Solutions offered herein may be taken as a basis for further research.

This article examines the application of usability methods in translation evaluation. The methods are used to analyse a translation criticised for its difficult language and poor translation quality. Instead of traditional translation quality assessment, the focus is on examining the translation's usability. Usability evaluation places the focus on the user and use-context of the product. In this study the Finnish translation of The Guitar Handbook is evaluated by using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Both methods would seem to be well suited to translation evaluation, pointing out important usability issues in the text and providing two different points of view. Usability evaluation would appear to offer new and interesting angles for evaluating translations and developing translation quality assessment models.

- by Juho Suokas
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- Usability, Translation, Usability Testing, Translation Quality Assessment

The study aimed to correlate the reading comprehension and translation performance of English linguistic students, then inform some pedagogical implications for the teaching of reading comprehension in translation classes in order to enhance the translation quality performed by the students. To this end, 45 junior students of English linguistics specialization of Hung Vuong University, including 5 males and 40 females, aged from 20 to 22, were subject to a TOEFL reading comprehension test and a translation performance test (ATA guidelines, 2011). Data were analyzed using the Pearson Correlation, SPSS version 20.0. The coefficient correlation of students' reading comprehension and their translation performance was noted 0.721 at the significant level of 0.01. It was found that the Reading comprehension was closely related to translation performance. Along the reading comprehension question types, translation performance was affected by the ability to determine gist and main ideas of the text, identify the vocabulary, infer the implied meanings and identify the writer's style and attitudes. The results were discussed, and implications for teaching reading comprehension to enhance translation performance were presented.

El objetivo principal de esta tesis es conocer en mayor profundidad diversos aspectos de la revisión de traducciones mediante cinco objetivos específicos: 1) Trazar el estado de la cuestión en la Traductología; 2) Conocer la relevancia de... more

- by Silvia Parra Galiano
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- Translation Quality Assessment

This research attempted to evaluate the quality of Persian translation of drug leaflets. The researchers randomly selected a set of 30 pharmaceutical leaflets collected between March-August, 2015. The leaflets were analyzed based on House's functional-pragmatic model of translation quality assessment. At first, the profiles of both source texts and target texts were collected. Then, their overtly and covertly erroneous errors and the kinds of strategies used by the translators in translating the pharmaceutical leaflets into Persian were identified. The results indicate that out of 90 selected sentences of English leaflets, 47 were overtly erroneous and 43 were error-free. These overtly erroneous translations had 27 instances of " mistranslation " , 15 instances of " grammatical mistakes " , six instances of " addition " , six instances of " omission " and four instances of " substitution ". The only covert error was " tenor mismatch " in all sample sentences. The study findings can help teachers in translation studies to improve the quality of students' translation. Moreover, awareness of the errors in the current leaflet translations can assist students in performing their future jobs as translators. The findings may directly and indirectly affect the health of patients in an efficient and effective way.

This study, concerning Julian House's (2015) newly revised Translation Quality Assessment model, aimed at two things: first, to pinpoint some of the developments in this revised model as compared with the previous version and second, to apply it to a Persian translation of Chomskey's Media Control to estimate its viability. The results of the application of the model indicates that the translation, by Sari Aslani, has fallen short of fulfilling the functions of the source text. Furthermore, House's new model proved practical in assessing political translations.

- by Hamid Varmazyari
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- Translation Quality Assessment

The present paper studies diverse procedures related to Venuti " s strategies of domestication and foreignisation in Farsi dubbing and subtitling of the English movie, Warcraft directed by Duncan Jones. The procedures of both domestication and foreignisation were studied and statically analysed for the purpose of exploring the film translation method (dubbing or subtitling) which is closer to target-language-culture and the one which is closer to source-language-culture. In other words it was intended to explore which translation strategy (domestication or foreignisation) dominates dubbing and which one dominates subtitling. The tertiary purpose was to compare the reasons of differences in dubbing versus subtitling on the one hand, and the reasons of differences of the target text from the source text. The statistical analysis revealed that in dubbing, cultural equivalence is the most frequently used procedure (38.26%) apparently for making the movie visible for the public Iranian audience and adjust the movie to cultural considerations. Henceforth, dubbing orients to domestication. However, subtitling, with literal translation as the most frequently used procedure (57.4%), orients to foreignisation. In dubbing of the movie, most differences are related to cultural equivalence (38.26%) and the literal translation (29.56%) is in the next step. An interesting point is that the procedure of calque is neither used in subtitling nor in dubbing. In subtitling, cultural equivalence stands in the second place (17.34) and explanation (9.50%) occupies the third place. Other procedures " frequencies show no meaningful difference. Once implemented on more cases, the findings of this study have the potentialities of generalization to identify the most frequently occurred errors in movie translation industry and henceforth suggesting translation solutions for rendering dubbing and subtitling with more degree of naturalness.

Translation quality assessment is at the heart of any theory of translation. It is used in the academic or teaching contexts to judge translations, to discuss their merits and demerits and to suggest solutions. However, literary translations needs more consideration in terms of quality and clarity as it is widely read form of translation. In this respect, Persian literary translation of Kite Runner was taken for investigation based on House's (2014) functional pragmatic model of translation quality assessment. To this end, around 100 pages from the beginning of both English and Persian versions of the novel were selected and compared. Using House's model, the profile of the source text register was created and the genre was recognized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The results were minute mismatches in field, tenor, and mode which accounted for as overt erroneous expressions and leading matches which were accounted for as covert translation. The mismatches were some mistranslations of tenses and selection of inappropriate meanings for the lexicon. Since the informal and culture specific terms were transferred thoroughly, the culture filter was not applied. Besides, as the translation was a covert one. The findings of the study have implications for translators, researchers and translator trainers.

Many techniques have been applied in the interpretation and translation in the field of tourism guiding. This research paper focuses on the interpreting techniques of tour guides in North Sumatra. It seeks the types and the capabilities of tour guides in interpretation of the meanings of heritage of tourist destinations in North Sumatra. Data of this research were collected through document analysis, interviews, and analyzed using interactive data analysis in ancient tombs of Kings Sidabutar and the traditional house of Karonese Siwaluh Jabu at Dokan village in Karo district. The findings of this study showed that there were eight interpreting techniques applied by the tour guides in consecutive and liaison interpreting modes. The summarizing was the dominant technique. It was applied in order to clarify the objects.

La Critique des traductions littéraires. Esquisse d’un modèle pour l’évaluation esthétique de textes cible provenant du même texte source.
On entend quelquefois déplorer l’absence d’une critique des traductions fondée sur une Étude objective et systématique du texte. Il est vrai que des modèles ont dejà été proposés pour évaluer la qualité d’un texte cible donné. Or, à ma connaissance, il s’agit toujours de tentatives portant sur le langage non littéraire.
Cette communication présentera l’esquisse d’un modèle qui, en partant d’une ana¬lyse détaillée d’un certain nombre de traits textuels formellement définis, permet de comparer et d’évaluer des textes cible constituant chacun une traduction d’un texte original d’une grande valeur esthétique et littéraire. En fait, suivant l’hypothèse qui sous-tend ce modèle, il est possible d’identifier un ensemble de paramètres liés à la forme linguistique (métrique ou textuelle) qui, conjointement, permettent des prédictions quant à la qualité générale d’un texte cible que l’on compare soit à son texte source, soit à d’autres textes cible.
Ce modèle a fait l’objet d’un examen préliminaire dont je décrirai certains résultats. Le texte source utilisé est le cinquième chant de l’Inferno de la Divina Commedia de Dante Alighieri, les textes cible sont neuf traductions en suédois publiés entre 1857 et 1983.

The paper aimed to investigate the role of translator's religious ideology on his/her translation of the Nobel Quran by focusing on English translations of four verses from Surah An-Nisa (Women), Surah Al-Ahzab (The Confederates) and Surah An-Nur (Light) which are mostly referred to with the aim of imagining Islam as a religion that oppresses women and abuses their rights. To this end, four English translations of the Nobel Quran by four translators from Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds, with different ideologies, were selected as the corpus of this study. The research applied Farahzad's model of translation criticism (Based on Fairclough's approach to CDA) as the theoretical framework of this paper. Based on this framework, English translations of selected verses were compared with their original versions at the textual level and paratextual level. The result of this study demonstrated that it is difficult to conclude that there is relationship between translator's religious ideology and his/her translation of Quran.

Drawing on adaptive models of translation, the paper attempts to identify how a change in the readership of the text could result in changes in the target text. For this purpose, a well-known book on the history of Iran, written originally in English and later translated into Persian, by a well-versed scholar was selected. The corpus was then analyzed using Vehmas-Lehto's (2002) classification of pragmatic adaptation and Chesterman and Wagner's (2002) model of pragmatic strategies. Results indicated that from among the adaptation types 'addition' was employed with the highest frequency, followed by omission. In addition, 'explicitness' and 'information change' as pragmatic strategies showed to be often used by the translator. Further, in both categories of 'omission' and 'addition', 'information change' appeared to be the most frequently employed strategy. The findings are discussed focusing on how translation practice can be improved based on the survey of recent translation theories.

Conditional Conjunction in legal texts has its own characteristics. As the grammatical word, it differs from the content words in which translating conditional conjunction leads to different techniques in translating conditional conjunction. This study is particularly purposed to explain how conditional conjunction is translated from English (Source Text: ST) into Indonesian (Target Text: TT), and its effect on legal interpretation in Indonesian. Comparative method is applied to interpret the data. Besides, this study also explore how the use of different conditional conjunction also effect on how legal sentence is interpreted differently between in English and Indonesian. This possibly creates multi interpretation between ST and TT. Most translation techniques applied are single and double techniques, this indicates that translating conditional conjunction requires special thoughtfulness to gain equivalence both grammatically and semantically in ST and in TT. Therefore, this study is necessary both in determining language system in legal documents an in comprehending legal effect in TT as the consequence of translating Conditional Conjunction in legal documents.

This paper aims to explore the differences and similarities between translating
into Spanish and into Galician, focusing on translation policy and the relationship
between translation and nationalism. Literary translation into Galician, a
minor language, is argued to face the power situation of translation into Spanish, a
major language. To illustrate this point, translations into Galician and Spanish of
some current English and American novels have been studied. The analysis focuses
on identifying the translation strategies used by translators so as to check whether
Schleiermacher’s concept of foreignization applies ( On the Different Methods of
Translation , 1813). He maintains that a national culture can be formed by refi ning
its language through foreignizing translation. Thus, translation into Galician is supposed
to challenge Spanish hegemony by enriching Galician language and culture.

Translation of any text into a second language is recognized as inter-cultural communication. Translated literary text is produced as a result of negotiations among different languages. In this respect, the paper aimed to evaluate major approaches associated with quality assessment of literary translation. The Qualitative approach has been applied to investigate the techniques and linguistic features, associated with the translation of literary text. The study analyzed and assessed the issue of literary translation and has emphasized on the maintenance of text originality during translation. The investigation of techniques and linguistic approach has been assessed by employing theoretical perspective. Different past researches have been analyzed, based on the literary text features to identify the associated factors. The translation of any text is observed as an act of parallel creation, where a translator acts as a bridge across different cultures. A creative literary translator is one, who possesses good language skills to render meaning, style, and feeling to the translated content without disturbing the originality of the text. Therefore, a literary translator is believed to have a significant contribution towards better understanding of diverse cultures. The translated text is termed as a hybrid to some extent on the basis of cultural environment as it involves the transplantation of source text into target language.

In the current context of technological advancements and development of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of our societies and technological improvements are transforming our lives in all areas. Translation is no exception. With the emergence of neural machine translation (nmt), a new paradigm of machine translation (mt), the quality offered by such systems has improved substantially, and some authors even claim that mt systems equal or surpass human translation quality in certain fields such as news. However, specialized genres involve intrinsic complexities. In legal translation, the anisomorphism of legal language can be a very difficult gap for machines to bridge: different terms for the same concept in different legal systems, zero or partial equivalence, and so on. In this study, a human evaluation of three human translations of English-Spanish company contracts and one translation generated by a nmt engine will be carried out. Results show that mt could be a very useful teaching tool in the legal translation classroom, allowing to identify the skills that could be enhanced by such an approach. Finally, how mt could be incorporated into the training of legal translators is proposed, and the advantages it would have over traditional teaching-learning methods are presented.

Translation is a way of communicating meaning from one language into another. In this bidirectional communicating tool, the translators should be aware of the two languages and also should have good command of them so as to be able to covey accurate meaning as natural as possible. For this to occur the translators should take different issues into considerations such as linguistic and cultural ones especially when the two languages are not close to each other. Thus, the purpose of the present article was to identify the most frequent shifts of coordinate and correlative conjunctions in translations from English to Persian. To reach this aim, four original English texts and their Persian translations were selected and all cases of English coordinate and correlative conjunctions identified and then compared with their Persian equivalents. The findings indicated that the most frequent strategy applied in the translation of coordinate conjunctions was equivalent substitution, and for correlative conjunctions, unit shifts and equivalents substitution were the most frequent used strategies.

In some South African higher education environments, a significant number of documents are translated in order to help facilitate successful learning. However, in an attempt to reduce the cost of translation, lecturers and students often explore avenues other than professional translation to have their study material translated. Often just any bilingual person is approached to translate or a free web-based translation application such as Google Translate is employed. This
article describes a study in which the quality of translation products created by Google Translate, a translation student and a professional translator were assessed and compared. Six different text types were translated, one document each from Afrikaans into English and another from English into Afrikaans. Five raters assessed the quality of the 36 translation products using Colina’s assessment tool (2009). The results showed that a client would not have to spend much time correcting
translation products by a professional translator, but that the translations by Google Translate needed substantial improvement in their quality. Of the six text types translated by Google Translate, the PowerPoint slides yielded the best results. Nevertheless, the quality was still below average, and the texts would require extensive post-editing for their function to be met.

- by Susan Lotz and +1
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- Translation Studies, Higher Education, Machine Translation, Computer-Aided Translation

In the rapidly globalized world, the need for mass production has increased the necessity for standards and their translations. National standardization body of Turkey, Turkish Standards Institution (TSE), went through a radical change in translation policy in the year of 2016, which resulted in the introduction of a new standard developing and translation guide, which is a commission in terms of Skopos theory. The present study aims to evaluate the quality of standards translated from English into Turkish after and before the year of 2016 to determine where there has been an improvement in the translation quality of standards as a result of the innovation. For this purpose, corpus one (C1) consisting of 10 randomly chosen construction standards translated before the year of 2016 and corpus two (C2) consisting of 10 randomly chosen construction standards translated after the year of 2016 were evaluated according to Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) translation quality assessment model (Lommel, Burchardt & Uszkoreit, 2015). Translation errors found in each corpus were classified according to seventeen error types of this model and weighting according to their severities. The results of translation quality analysis of C1 and C2 were compared to find out whether there was any improvement in translation quality of C2 after the introduction of the commission in the year of 2016. The quantitative data analysis revealed that there were 544 instance of translation error observed in C1, while in C2, the number of error decreased to 314. Statistical analysis revealed that the introduction of the commission has significantly improved translation quality. The qualitative analysis revealed that the error patterns differed between the two corpora: in C1 translation errors statistically distributed uniformly over categories while in C2 the majority of the errors were left in the category of Fluency, which could be attributed to the peculiarities of the guideline of 2016. As a result, the present study provides a piece of evidence that the presence of commission is likely to enhance the quality of translation and supports the view of Vermeer that a translator should be provided with a properly defined commission before starting the process of translation.
Key Words
Translation Quality Assessment, Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), Skopos Theory, Standards, Technical Translation

Verbal humor is often viewed as the most difficult text to translate. This study aims to know how verbal humor is translated in the subtitling. This study is a descriptive qualitative research. The data was taken from the VCD of Rio animated film. The analysis of the study results in several findings. Wordplay, Allusion, and Verbal Irony are the kinds of verbal humor that are found in Rio. The subtitling strategies the translator applied in translating the verbal humor dialogues in Rio are expansion, paraphrase, transfer, imitation, transcription, condensation, and decimation. In analyzing the acceptability level of the translation of verbal humor dialogues in Rio, the translating text is considered acceptable.

- by Anindia Ayu
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- Subtitling, Audiovisual Translation, Translation Quality Assessment, Dubbing

Over the past years, whenever we read about using machine translation (MT) we were advised that it was not suitable for regular professional translation. Students were warned to use Google Translate in their assignments or exams, and would be punished if they did. The reason was that MT usually produced a poor outcome whenever it was not applied for controlled language of pre-edited texts within a specific field of expertise, and with post-edition of the target text.
This situation led us to avoid using MT. Related to specialized texts, and after a time of training, meanwhile MT systems managed to produce quite acceptable results and help to translate faster. But in recent times, new systems have been developed called Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and the output quality is reasonably good. As translator trainers we asked ourselves: Why not use post-editing of automatic translated texts as a chance for translation pedagogy and focus on diagnosis and therapy of those errors still made by MT as a means to improve command in both, mother and second language?

This dissertation is an exploratory study of the process of assessment practices of simultaneous interpreting quality (SIQ) at the Higher Arab Institute of Translation (HAIT) from teachers’ and students’ perspectives. It delves into the perceptions, views and opinions of the teachers and students alike regarding the procedures of quality assessment of simultaneous interpreting along the process of training, i.e. from the Admission Test to graduation. It aims at generating hypotheses on quality assessment issues for further research in this field in order to improve the teaching of simultaneous interpreting in this Institute and elsewhere. This research looks into the scoring of the Admission Test, the Interpreter Aptitude Test and the formal Exams of Simultaneous Interpreting against the principles of educational assessment, namely validity, reliability, authenticity, practicality in addition to fairness, usefulness and meaningfulness. It is based on a post-positivist paradigm and a mixed-methods approach, and it is mainly qualitative as it does not just deal with the statistical data, i.e. the numbers, but with the subjective experience of the respondents. It relies on the methods of case study, grounded theory and a questionnaire-based survey. As far as the results are concerned, they have revealed, on the one hand, the lack of teachers’ awareness about how to construct and design valid, reliable and authentic educational tests and exams. On the other hand, the results revealed a mismatch between the perspectives of the teachers, who are professionals, and those of the students regarding the skills and criteria of assessment in almost all the tests and exams. Key words: Quality Assessment, Simultaneous Interpreting Quality Assessment, the Higher Arab Institute of Translation, Teachers’ Perspective, Students’ Perspective

- by Abdelkader NADIR
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- Assessment, Arabic, Grounded Theory (Research Methodology), Case Study Research

The focus of this paper is on the third and final stage of the translation process, i.e. the stage of the TT revision and assessment, with the aim to delineate its significance, in both the productive and the academic contexts of translation. Detailed revision and TT assessment and qualification models are presented, which in the authors' view can be used for professional and didactic purposes, in the context of a continuous interaction that utilises modern IT systems, such as term bases and translation workflow systems. It is posited that the progressive systematisation of the revision stage, in a productive context, can benefit both the translation product as such, and its acceptability, while in an academic setting, it aims to complement the level of knowledge and expertise of the trainee translators, and therefore to enhance their overall competence. The findings and conclusions draw also upon the authors' professional experience from applying an intensive Translation Workflow and Quality Assessment Model.

ABSTRACT
Translatologists have tried to take advantage of scientific models to escape from the
diversity of personal ideas to assess the quality of a piece of translation. One of those models
is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. In this paperthe researcher has chosen “Uncle
Willy” by William Faulkner and analysed its transitivity patterns, to find out the writer’s
style, based on Halliday’s six processes and compared it with those of the translated text.
The results show that the translator has emphasized the writer’s materialistic point of view
and has decreased the relational interactions between the characters of the story in the
interests of their mental actions. This has caused relational actions to happen in regard to
dialogues while in ST more verbal actions happen in characters’ mind. And the existential
aspect of the story has taken a stronger colour.

- by Muhammad Reza Samimi
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- Translation Quality Assessment

Translation and interpreting help mediate knowledge in the world of medicine or pharmaceutical research, but are rarely the focus of healthcare researchers' attention unless a mistranslation triggers severe clinical consequences, including health or life hazard, or becomes the reason for lawsuits or financial claims. It is therefore crucial to ensure sufficient standards of quality in medical translation and interpreting. This article discusses medical translation quality, translator training and qualifications, translation quality management procedures, with particular focus on back-translation and parallel translation in the light of improving the quality of translation and interpreting for the medical sector. The author presents a model for medical translation quality assurance and provides helpful tips for medical translators.

L'objectif de cet article est de proposer une réflexion sur le rôle que pourraient jouer les études menées dans le cadre des corpus-based translation studies (e.g. travaux de Johansson, Baker, Laviosa, Olohan, Xiao), que l'on pourrait traduire par traductologie de corpus [Loock, R. (2012a)], dans l'évaluation de la qualité des traductions, en particulier dans le monde universitaire. En effet, depuis les années 1990, et sous l'influence de Mona Baker, de nombreuses études ont montré qu'il existait des différences importantes entre langue originale et langue traduite, faisant ainsi écho aux notions d'interlangue [Selinker, L. (1972)] ou de troisième code [Frawley, W. (1984)]. Si l'interprétation dominante dans la littérature est une interprétation en termes d'universaux de traductions tels que définis dans les travaux de Baker, d'autres en revanche voient en ces différences un résidu de l'activité traduisante (translationese) qu'il conviendrait de réduire au maximum afin de respecter une contrainte dite d'usage [Loock, R. (2010)].

- by Rudy Loock and +1
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- Translation Studies, Corpus-Based Translation Studies, Traductologie, Translation Quality Assessment

Phraseological competence, although traditionally left somewhat in the background in research on translation quality assessment, refers to a high level of knowledge of a language, and is therefore worthy of greater attention. Some studies , which are exceptions to this neglect, suggest that the level of phraseological quality of a text is directly related to its overall quality. This paper assesses these 2 types of quality in 14 original and translated texts from a parallel electronic corpus from museums and art centers in the city of New York, the aim being to test whether there is a correlation between phraseological and overall quality. In absolute terms, the results of the phraseological assessment are usually seen to be better than those from the overall assessment. On comparing the two analyses, and despite generally negative results and a few notable exceptions, there is a tendency toward this correlation.

U medijima se često piše o lošim prevodima u reklamama, pa čak i u zvaničnim dokumentima. Sjetit ćete se neugodnosti koju je bh. državljanka doživjela u jednom veleposlanstvu kada joj nisu htjeli prihvatiti međunarodni rodni list izdat u BiH. U članku se krivica prebacuje na službenike bh. institucija koji ne poznaju dobro strane jezike. Često kao krajnji korisnici nekog prevedenog teksta ne razumijemo o čemu se u tekstu radi, ili primjećujemo kako tekst nije prošao lekturu, korekturu i redakturu.[1] Lošem standardu u prevođenju pogoduje i neregulisanost tržišta što omogućava da se prevodi za jako niske cijene, čime se degradira i struka i kvalitet prevoda. Griješiti je normalno, prirodno, i ne postoji osoba koja ne griješi, ali je ljudski i željeti ispraviti greške, poboljšati sve što bi se moglo poboljšati i izgraditi sistem i standard koji bi pomogao da se greške izbjegnu ili da se dešavaju što rjeđe. Stoga želim da podijelim svoje dvadesetogodišnje iskustvo i da kažem nešto o izazovima s kojima se odgovorniji prevodioci i prevoditeljice sreću kako bismo raspravu usmjerili ka postizanju nekog konstruktivnog prijedloga rješenja.

- by Roberto Martínez Mateo
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- Art, Metrics, Quantitative Methods, Translation Quality Assessment

The present paper discusses translation quality assessments by adopting a critical perspective on five translators' organizations, which are intended to assess the quality of non-literary translations with a particular focus on their objectivity, validity, and inter-rater reliability. Within this framework, it aims to contribute to the related literature (1) by discussing the objectivity, validity, and inter-rater reliability of the quality assessment methods of five translator's organizations, namely the American (2) by making suggestions on quality assessment concerning non-literary translation in view of the findings hereof. The study qualitatively analyzes the content of the guides and rubrics provided on the websites of these five organizations and discusses the objectivity, validity, and inter-rater reliability of their assessments in consideration of seven parameters, i.e. "purpose of assessment", "purpose of assigned translation", "duration", "source text", "assessor", "marking", and "grading". The findings showed that each organization suffers from varying degrees of objectivity, validity, and inter-rater reliability issues.

- by Mehmet Yildiz
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- Translation Quality Assessment

The study of translation norms is one of the areas in translation studies which identify regularities of behavior (i.e. trends of relationships and correspondences between ST and TT segments) by comparing source texts and their translations. Norms of translation are mostly done in areas other than religious texts. Therefore, it seems necessary to do a research on religious texts. Textual–linguistic norms govern the selection of TT linguistic material: lexical items, phrases, and stylistic features. To do so, translation strategies adopted by translators were identified through comparing translations and source texts. Translation strategies proposed by Chesterman (1997) are investigated in samples of texts translated by World Ahlubayt assembly, an organization in charge of religious translation in Iran. The texts included seven books from seven translators in World Ahlulbayt Assembly. The strategies investigated in corpus dealt with three linguistic levels: semantic, syntactic and pragmatic strategies and changes done at these three levels. The results showed that syntactic changes were of the highest frequency in all texts. At semantic level, synonymy was the most frequent translation strategy. At syntactic level, clause structure changes and at pragmatic level and explicitness change were the most frequent changes.

The paper discusses two publications of J. D. Salinger’s novel, “The Catcher in the Rye” in Latvian in 1969 and 2001. Following brief theoretical insights, the paper includes an analysis of the Latvian target texts, as well as, where applicable, three Russian translations, in order to identify the differences and their character and acceptability, and to examine whether the Latvian publications represent high-quality translations.
A highly specific context of a prose fiction text imply that the respective translation is likely to become outdated.
The 2001 Latvian publication of the novel is largely in line with the first Latvian translation, where the impact of the Russian translation is apparent and strong; respectively, both translations feature a number of issues arising from both the specific circumstances during the preparation of the first translation and from translator’s competence. Some of the most obvious and simple errors have been eliminated. In general, however, the quality of the Latvian translation is not sufficient; a new translation is needed.