Translation Product: How is it Assessed by the Trainees, the Trainers and the Employers?

Abstract

According to Koby (2014), translation assessment for pedagogical implications needs to be investigated further. This paper discusses how translations of university senior students in the Jordanian context are assessed by university translation teachers, employers in the translation labour market and by the students themselves. It probes into the assessment criteria employed by the teachers and the employers for pedagogical implications. Teachers and students were sampled from five different universities in Jordan while the employers were sampled from translation service providers Amman. Twenty six senior students were requested to perform a task of inverse translation to be assessed by the three groups of assessors. The teachers and the employers were asked to rate the product on a five-point scale and comment on the errors and deficiencies that are considered crucial from their perspective. In addition, they were requested to elaborate on the assessment criteria they used. Students, on the other hand, had to respond to a self-criterion rating scale. The results show that there was a high level of concurrence in the assessment of the teachers and the employers and a disjunction between that and the self-assessment where the latter showed some over-estimation in comparison with the second party assessment. .