Abstract
Various scholars from different schools of thought have proposed criteria and/ or models or translation assessment. Surprisingly, almost none of them are tailor-made for a manageable summative evaluation of student translation. That is why most translation teachers still draw on holistic and traditional methods of translation evaluation in their exams. These methods are either too holistic or too detailed (and complex) for translation evaluation purposes in educational settings. The holistic approaches that verge on subjectivity are quite manageable for a teacher who is to evaluate of a score of students, whereas the detailed and quantitative models, which are highly demanding on the limited resources of a classroom teacher, are considered highly objective. Feeling the need for a model, which is both manageable and objective, this study aims at reaching a compromise between the subjectivity and the complexity of these approaches to translation evaluation. Our proposed model draws on and combines the five linguistic equivalences introduced by Koller (1979) and the five-leveled holistic scheme for translation evaluation proposed by Waddington (2001). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.26.12421
Highlights
Various scholars from different schools of thought have proposed criteria and/ or models or translation assessment
The holistic approaches that verge on subjectivity are quite manageable for a teacher who is to evaluate of a score of students, whereas the detailed and quantitative models, which are highly demanding on the limited resources of a classroom teacher, are considered highly objective
Feeling the need for a model, which is both manageable and objective, this study aims at reaching a compromise between the subjectivity and the complexity of these approaches kalbų studijos / studies about languages no. 26 / 2015 to translation evaluation
Summary
Translators use mainly dichotomous criteria such as word-for-word versus sense-for-sense, literal versus free, and faithful versus unfaithful to tell ‘good’ translations from the ‘bad’ ones’, but can a translation be absolutely good or bad, faithful or unfaithful? Some emphasized the preservation of some abstract constructs such as ‘spirit’ and ‘truth’ to assess translations and translators (Kelly 1979, p.205). Al-Qinai (2000) attempted to develop an ‘empirical’ framework for quality assessment drawing on some parameters like textual typology, formal correspondence, thematic coherence, reference cohesion, lexical-syntactical properties, etc Such an eclectic model only adds to the number of the parameters involved in the assessment process, something that is to be avoided in order to have a manageable evaluation criterion for student translations. __ Objective and holistic at the same time, because the sum of micro-textual errors may not determine the quality of a translation and translation evaluation cannot reach to the level of physical sciences in its accuracy Such a model needs a scoring system including:. The existing models either draw on too many parameters in their analysis and are, too unmanageable for the summative evaluation of student translations or they are too reductionist and include only a couple of highly impressionistic criteria and verge on extreme subjectivity. Two raters can judge a student translation in order to increase inter-subjective reliability
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