evaluation of translation quality

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The evaluation of translation quality ..Geoffrey Kingscott ....

TranslationEvaluation As the economy becomes global in scale, and every large company has to operate nmltilingually,QualityPerformance of translator naturally want to know the quality of what they a re buying. This paper identifies five ways of

assessing the quality of a translation: by getting the opinion of a second person; by layingdown qualifications for the translator; by defining the procedures constrainingthe productionof 11 translation; by looking at the degree to which comprehension of the author's intent andequivalence of effect have been achieved; and, finally, by creating rnetrics to measure the degreeto which the customer's requirements (explicit or implicit) have been achieved.

translation buyers inlarge companies are exercising greater and greater influence. Those buyers

How do you evaluate the qua 1iy of a translation? The tradi tiona I answer, if you ask thetranslation profession, has always been that a translation is evaluated by a second, moreexperienced translator or reviser, who gives his or her opinion.

But this ishardly an objective method.

Because if a text isgiven to ten professional translators to translate, the actual translationswill never be identical, a translator's style being as individual as fingerprints. So too thejudgement of one individual reviser may vary from that of another individual reviser.And the large international companies, themajor buyers of translation, are starting todemandmore objective methods. In the automobile industry the large manufacturers in the UnitedStates have come together to set up working party J2450 to look into this very subject.

Ihink those of us in the translation profession also have a responsibility for trying to findways of evaluating translation quality. It is almost alarming when the initiative is beingtaken by customers, and not translators. And in any case when we think about who needstranslation quality assessment, the practitioners need it almost as rnuchas the customers.Itwould be good for us to be tested against some outside criteria.

One cannot say a great deaJ has been done so far in the translation profession, though therehas been some work in translation studies. However, there has been one seminar on this Paper presented at the International Meeting on Translation and Interpretation, School of Languages, MacauPolytechnic Institute, 6-7 May 1999. M anaging Directo r o f Praeto rlus L td and President o f Praetcrius N


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that one should look for comprehension of intent and equivalence of response. Thecomprehension of intent means that the translator must have fully understood the intentionsofthe author of the source document. Byequivalence of response ismeant that the translationshould have the 'equivalent effect' on the reader of the translation as the original documenthas on a source language reader. Different languages have different emotional responses,and it istherefore up to the translator to ensure that a warning notice about the side-effectsof a medicine, for example, is not dangerously toned down, or irresponsibly exaggerated,in translation.

The latest theory in translation studies, much discussed at the last ESTcongress inGranada,Spain, in 1998, is the so-called Skopos theory, which develops the earlier Reiss-Vermeerthesis in emphasising the purpose of a translation rather than the nature of the source text.

And in my opinion this leads us directly to the fifth and what r consider the most promisingapproach to translation quality evaluation, that of compliance with specification. Becausewhat I do miss in translation studies - and I do follow all the arguments - is any mention ofthe customer. The customer wants a translation for a particular purpose. Again to take anexample from pharmaceutical translation - homologation procedures (to get governmentapproval for drugs), information for medica Ipractitioners, instructions for patients,packaging, etc. - all have different purposes, and the purpose determines the way inwhichthe translation is conducted. For example in instructions for patients it is now customaryin English to refer to "the doctor" because the patient knows what a doctor is but mightmisunderstand a term such as "medical practitioner" even though the latter is, pedantically,more correct (since 'doctor' does not differentiate a doctor of medicine from a doctor ofphilosophy or a doctor of theology). But it would be wrong to refer to a "doctor" in ahomologation document.

"Fitnessforpurpose" is also themostcommonly used summary oftheaimsof qualityassurance.Not every customer will want to provide a specification for every translation, but usuallythe expectations can be deduced from the type of document. So 1and others have arguedthat the basis for translation quality evaluation must bePurpose-oriented Explicitor ImplicitSpecification (PEXIS).An implicit specification would depend on the text type, and itcanbe said that there are almost as many text types as there are documents. But essentially, asresearch intranslation studies has shown, they fall into six broad categories: exegesis (whereevery scrap of meaning in the source text is being teased out), literary works, matchingtransfers (where the source text and the translation must be strictly equivalent, as in treaties,legal texts, contracts, patents, homologation documents), entertainments (illustratedchildren's books, for example, dubbing and subtitling; this category often necessitates somecultural adaptation), instructions (manuals, patient information, etc.) and promotions(advertising and sales material, which again may require cultural adaptation).

Once there isa specification the translation user, possibly in consultation with the translationsupplier canproceed todraw up a seriesofweighted rnetrics.Theimportant point to rememberhere in matching transfers or instructional texts is that the metrics should measure the

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consequences of the error, not the language quality as such. Translators, even those who.....rite superbly, are notoriously lax with figures, but an error such as "the patient must noteats for two hours ... " is not life-threatening, whereas writing 15 mg instead of 1.5 mg is.A common base for a metric is a scale of 0 to 9 for each error. The "eats" error might rank as"2" or "3" on the scale, but the 15mg error would rank as an 'X' - i.e. a single mistake whichwould invalidate the whole of that particular translation. However, in a promotional textthe quality of the language i~more important. since serious linguistic solecisms create abad impression on the reader and could lead to loss of business, and then "eats" mightrank as a serious "6" or "7" on the scale.The most serious category of error must always be that of mistranslation, which has beendefined by the )2450 working group as "incorrect interpretation of the intention of theoriginal author", The translation user must define from the outset what is an " X U error, i.e.one that is so serious it invalidates the translation. Some mistranslations can be "slightlyoff the mark" without major consequences. Other error categories can be omission (acontinuous block of text in the source language has no counterpart in the target languagetext), syntactic (wrong construction in the target language, inappropriate word order),terminological (defined as any target language term that violates a client term glossary: oris in clear conflict with de facto standard translation(s) of the source language term in thepharmaceutics field, or is inconsistent with other translations of the source language termin the sam!" document), or misspelling.The difficult one is "style". Here you have to beware of the lDTlSlR syndrome ("J didn'ttranslate it so it's rubbish"). Many translations produced by a professional translator for acompany are gin'n to someone in the company who knows, or thinks he knows, the twolanguages involved for his opinion on the translation, Every layman who fancies himselfas an amateur linguist thinks that unless the translation matches exactly in style what hewould have put the translation is wrong. The term "lDTISIR syndrome" WdS coined byone customer who became frustrated that no-one would ever say that a translation wasacceptable.But if something is definitely wrong it will be caught by one of the metric categories, andusing metrics forces revisers into being objective. Of course there may be variability in themarking, but a volume of case law quickly builds up. and as experience grows so does theaccuracy of the marking. Then quality targets, depending on how critical the quality of thetranslation is to the company (ten error points per thousand words, say, or even 10 errorpoints per 10,000 words) can be written into translation contracts.Quality assurance metr ics is borrowed from technical writing, where it is fast gainingground. Proprietary quality assurance systems such as Six Sigma will lay down precisequality targets. There is no reason the same principles cannot be applied to translation, butonly if we can be quite definite we know what the translation ;s for.This means making thecustomer think about translation, and making the customer more aware of translationproblems, and that cannot be iIbad thing.

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BibliographyBaker, Mona(I992), IIIo th er w o rd s, Routledge: London.Bassnett, Susan (1997). The translation of literature, The l ingui st , 36 (2),Bell, Roger T. (1991), T ra ns la tio n a nd tr an sla tin g, theory and pract ic e. Longman: London.Ebert, Iochen, et al, 211m Norm-Entuiur] DIN 2345 'O berse tzu l1 gsvo rh ab en ', e in e D eb atte.Mittei/ungsblatf,43 (1).

Embleton, Doug (1992). chapter Fore ig n l ung fl ng e publicity material (includes Embleton'stheory of 'the mirror effect' as a way of measuring translation quality), In L.ang!


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Newmark, Peter (1993). Paragraphs 01 1 tmnsiation, Multilingual Matters: Clevedon.Newmark, Peter (1992). Les r es po lfs lIl, i/it, ;s d ll traductcur, (translated into French by C.Pagnoulle), us gl'ns dJl pas:;age, ed. Christine Pagnoulle, University of Liege.Permentiers, Jacques, Springael, Erik & Troiano.Franco (1994).Trl1duclian, adaptation !'Iediting1Il1l1filinglle, Tee Editions: Brussels.Snell-Hornby (1988). Translation studte, I1Il i nt egrat ed appf lwc ir (particularly the last section,section 4), John Benjarnins Publishing Company.Safer, Morry lW97). Translator' s selj -I 'va/ llafion. In T he tra nsta to r's h an db oo k, I'd . Morry Soter,Schreiber Publishin: Rockville.Wedlake, LJ. et al (1992). Q uality standards and the implementation of t ec lmo logy in l ransl ,ll io l l,proceedings of the H'h annual Translating and the Computer conference. Aslib: London.Zlateva, Palma (1990). T ra nsla tio n: te xt a nd p re -te xt 'a de qu ac y rin d 'a cc ep tl1 bilih / in c ro ss- cu ltu ra !c ommunic atio n.ln T ra ns la tio n, It istory LIndcf ll ture, ed. Susan Bassnert &Andre Lefevere, PinterPublishers: London.

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rr. ldut, iLoM.,JIi1~,j" infuencia nesse mesrno mercado, devido nao so a globalizacao da econornia, mas tambem.a necesstdade1 . .1 u hdede das grandes ernpresas trabalharern a urn nivel multiJingue. E claro que estes mcsmos clientes queremo..,."'p"'nM,j" ".du'''' estar informados sobre a qualidade daquilo que estao a comprar. A presente comunicacao Idenrifica

5 maneiras de avaliar a qualidade da traducao: atraves do recurso a uma segunda opinlao, atraves daexrgencia de habiJita,oes au tradutor: atraves da definicao dos procedirnentos que condlcionarn 0trabalho de traducao:

evaluation of translation quality

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