[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Some of them described extremely detailed guidelines that to a126 Fanny Arango-Keeth and Geoxrey S.Kobycertain degree resemble the evaluation scales used by translator trainers inacademic settings (i.e., ranging from major errors such as mistranslations,unnecessary additions, or global errors to minor errors such as format, spacingand typos).One agency within this group indicated that their guidelines are based onthe SAE J2450 metric.12 This choice reects an exort to standardize assessmentcriteria.Another agency included the in-house translation quality guidelines inthe measures their project managers use to assure an error-free translation.Inthis particular case, what we found innovative about these guidelines was thatthey seemed to employ a two-way evaluation procedure.First, the editors use achecklist of questions on a rating scale from 1 to 10 to assess the quality oftranslations.Then the translators review the changes the editors made to theirtranslations and are allowed to accept or reject these changes and actually ratethe editor s work on the same scale of 1 to 10. 13A third case is that of an agency that described its grading scale as address-ing the issues that are traditionally used when rating translations, such asaccuracy, grammar, word usage, and ow.In this case, however, their transla-tion assessment procedure also includes a variable that is not focused on theevaluation of a given translation as a product but rather on the interpersonalrelationships and skills of a given translator: how easy the translator is to workwith and if he or she is open to feedback. This variable goes beyond perform-ance and represents an attitudinal assessment.In the academic/agency group composed of 5 individuals, two indicatedthat they use the general error marking guidelines employed by the ATA,aiming at establishing the nal quality of a translation project as a product.Twoparticipants in this group replied that neither a grading scale nor an assessmentinstrument was used and one stated that translation quality is much enhancedby hiring translators who have advanced degrees in the subject matter of thetranslation in question. This agency also included the category translator scomputer skills as part of their assessment guidelines.Finally, in the categories of academic/freelancer, agency/freelancer, free-lancer, and other (8), no assessment scales were described.It seems that some respondents found questions 6 and 7 to overlap.For allgroups, numerical guidelines for rating translations should help translators inacademic and non-academic settings detect major and minor errors.Translator training evaluation vs.assessment 127Concluding remarksWhen reviewing early approaches to translation quality assessment, we ndthat scholars such as Gnther Kandler in 1963 emphasize the importance ofstating the purpose of a given translation in order to assess its quality: weshould not forget that quality cannot possibly be assessed apart from thepurpose of the translation (295).Indeed, the purpose of translating in theacademic and professional settings is dixerent.The results of our study seem toconrm that in the case of academic settings, one of our initial theoreticalconsiderations, about the existence of limited applied studies that addressquality assessment, proved to be accurate.As Farzaneh Farahzad points out,the number of academic translation programs has increased; however, reliableassessment procedures and guidelines have yet to be developed (1992: 271).Indeed, the survey results for the academic group seem to show that nodistinction between formative and summative evaluations within the widerspectrum of what we will call didactic revision has been made.At the sametime, the academic community still needs to reach a consensus in terms of theevaluation instruments and rating scales they use.We would suggest that giventhe development of corpora-based translation instruction, new protocols forassessing translations can be established quickly, once the academic commu-nity realizes the importance of consensus.For example, Andrew Chestermanand Emma Wagner propose a protocol based on corpora:More recently, however, the availability of big computer corpora has led to aninterest in what have been called covert or distribution or quantitative errors (seeKenny 1999; Laviosa-Braithwaite 1998).These are things like using a given wordor structure much more often, or less often, than it would be used by nativespeakers writing a text of a similar sort on the same kind of subject.Scholarscompare translations with such parallel texts in order to discover what markstranslations as translations, if anything.Are there too many adjectives? Is theaverage sentence length too long? What about the distribution of nite verbs?(2001: 29)In the case of non-academic settings, it is important to point out that thetranslation industry has contributed signicantly to the exort to standardizetranslation quality assessment protocols.To illustrate the industry s preoccu-pation, Siu Ling Koo and Harold Kinds comment that [w]hat is needed is arigorous yet real-world approach, one that can be used easily, reliably, andconsistently, often under intense time pressure (2000: 147).In this samestudy, they call our attention to the case of an international localization agencyin which the quality assurance model adopted helps develop a standard under-128 Fanny Arango-Keeth and Geoxrey S.Kobystanding of quality among translators, editors, revisors, and quality controlmanagers in order to be able to assess translation quality using the sameparameters:L&L, a Netherlands-based translation and localization services provider, has ap-plied the Quality Assurance Model of the Localisation Industry Standards Associa-tion (LISA), and a translation sampling method developed for use with it.The toolsused to grade both translators and translations have led to a more explicit, objective,and uniform understanding of quality among translators and reviewers.(147)If we now turn our attention to the control of subjectivity when assessingtranslation errors, we nd our survey conrms the idea that all groups areaware of this limitation and agree to the fact that subjectivity cannot be totallycontrolled.However, following Rick Woyde (2001), we suggest that a consen-sus about measuring key translation qualities should be achieved.Neverthe-less, according to the survey results, translation agencies have been and areinstrumental in creating, monitoring, analyzing and improving procedures toassure a common understanding of the type of translation error encounteredin a translation project
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]