Abstract
Judging quality in translation and interpreting and in the associated task of revision has a long and controversial history. We briefly comment on some aspects of this history to provide context for the contemporary perspectives on and investigations into quality assessment that are represented in this volume of Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies. A fundamental obstacle to progress is the lack of consensus about how to characterize high-quality translation or interpreting, let alone the identification of broadly accepted models for measuring translation or interpreting quality or the ability of translators or interpreters. The advent of machine translation and post-editing has focused attention on the very nature of quality: Is it proximity to a “gold standard” of perfection or is it characteristic of a product that simply serves its purpose well enough to satisfy the needs of the consumer? In other words, is quality something that should be measured and judged in absolute terms or in relative terms? Different philosophies of quality assessment reflect these dichotomies, with the absolutists seeking objective assessments based on detailed analyses of taxonomies of errors, whereas the relativists prefer a more holistic approach that is more sympathetic to subjective judgements. The contributors to this volume present a broad range of approaches to quality assessment in a variety of contexts. We describe their achievements and provide brief analyses through the lens of the framework above.
Highlights
It is hardly speculation to imagine that translation and interpreting quality has been a topic, if not a contentious issue, even before our earliest records of written or oral language mediation
In the more recent development of Translation Studies, translation quality was an early topic of discussion in various venues: for instance, in 1959, when it was the topic of the third Congress of the International Federation of Translators (Cary & Jumpelt, 1963), followed by Katharina Reiss’s Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik (1971, English translation 2000), and in more “modern” times, when Marilyn Gaddis Rose inaugurated the ATA Scholarly Monograph series with a volume entitled Translation excellence: Assessment, achievement, maintenance (1987)
There is not even consensus on what constitutes the definition of a high-quality translation, as shown by two competing definitions, one narrow, one broad, put forward in the same 2014 article by Koby, Fields, Hague, Lommel and Melby: Narrow definition: “A high-quality translation is one in which the message embodied in the source text is transferred completely into the target text, including denotation, connotation, nuance, and style, and the target text is written in the target language using correct grammar and word order, to produce a culturally appropriate text that, in most cases, reads as if originally written by a native speaker of the target language for readers in the target culture.” (p. 416)
Summary
It is hardly speculation to imagine that translation and interpreting quality has been a topic, if not a contentious issue, even before our earliest records of written or oral language mediation. It defines it situationally for the audience and purpose and according to the specifications from the requester This could mean, for instance, that if price were the primary consideration, only minimum levels of accuracy and fluency would be acceptable, even if speakers of the language in question were to consider the text fundamentally flawed or difficult to read. In this introduction, we first discuss a variety of such issues of translation and interpreting quality assessment that are either addressed or implied in the various contributions to this volume, more from a language and translation studies philosophy point of view. We first discuss a variety of such issues of translation and interpreting quality assessment that are either addressed or implied in the various contributions to this volume, more from a language and translation studies philosophy point of view We place these contributions within a larger context
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