Going the Extra Mile: Improving Linguistic Quality in Translation

Abstract

In this century, the rise in mother-tongue speaker driven projects has led to the downplaying of the importance of linguistics. Many projects operate on the assumption that linguistic training is unnecessary for mother-tongue translators. There is documented evidence though that many translators are strongly influenced by a high prestige source text while drafting. In South Asia at least, a large number of organizations are doing translation, and not all of them value linguistic training. I contend that a more realistic solution is to have translation consultants pick up the slack by looking for language-related issues in the draft. In my research, I examined renderings of NT passages in eight South Asian language projects covering different language families. Of the 82 consultant note subcategories taught in training workshops, I restricted my review to 24 that deal especially with linguistic issues. The results show that the reviewing consultants detected only 3% – 20% of the issues that I found. I demonstrate tools for consultants to examine the actual draft even if they do not know the language. I also discovered that many potential errors are influenced by the forms of the classical regional language versions used as model texts. The issues discovered affect quality in two ways: naturalness and pragmatic accuracy. Looking for these potential errors is worth the extra time and effort on the part of the consultants, who can be easily trained for this enhanced review process.