Translation Quality Assessment Model Research Articles

Quality Assessment for The Translations of Museum Texts: A Case Study of The Archaeology and Ethnography Museum of Edirne

Museums have significant roles in promoting and presenting cultural heritage and cultural values in various ways. An intrinsic part of intercultural communication in museums, bilingual museum texts (e.g. labels, brochures, explanatory texts etc.) have become an important field to be investigated within the framework of Translation Studies. In order to make a contribution to the analysis of translation of museum texts, this study aims to provide a quality assessment of English translations of texts in the Archeology and Ethnography Museum of Edirne. Even though English translations of different texts types such as labels, brochures and explanatory texts are available in the museum, this study specifically focuses on the translation of explanatory texts presenting the ethnographic identity and archeological findings of the city. For this purpose, twenty-three texts displayed in information boards have been selected and their translations have been analyzed according to translation quality assessment model of Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MMQ). As a result of a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the selected texts, the type, distribution and frequency of translation errors encountered in the selected corpus have been described according to eight dimensions of the metric. Based on this text-based and linguistically-oriented methodology, the functionality of the translated museum texts has been evaluated. It is concluded that this study will provide a theoretical framework and methodological guide to improve the quality assessment competences of lectures and students at the departments of translation studies as well as professional translators and researchers working in the area of museum translation.

Recreating relevance: translated Arabic idioms through a relevance theory lens

This study uses relevance theory as an insightful heuristic model for translation quality assessment. As translation inherently involves communicating across contextual boundaries, the notion of relevance optimization continues to be a fruitful approach for research and practice. This investigation illuminates idioms as culturally embedded linguistic conventions, semantically abstruse, yet structurally crystallized. Idioms accrue fixed meanings within a speech community rather than by compositing constituent denotations. Classical Arabic poetry extensively harnesses idioms, not as ornamental substitutes for literal statements, but as intensive versions thereof. Losing idioms risks muting tonal intensity. By examining an Arabic verse exemplifying two idioms, and assessing thirteen English and French translations, this study reveals that an effective idiom translation requires looking beyond lexical equivalence. Rather, contextually unraveling connotative lexicons and reconstituting the idiom to achieve equivalent effects and optimal relevance is key. Thereby, successful idiom translation is defined not by formal correspondence, but by conveying implicated meanings and intended impacts. This work elucidates idiom translatability through an interdisciplinary relevance prism, advancing theory and equipping practitioners to navigate the interlingual labyrinth.

Translation Quality Assessment of Literary Texts: A Critical Analysis of Two Recent Arabic Translations of Orwell's Animal Farm (1945)

This article aims to assess and evaluate the quality of two recent Arabic translations of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), the first one by Mohammed Hasan Alawi (2019) and the second one by Hiba Fathi (2020) using House's (2015) Translation Quality Assessment model. A mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed. The qualitative method involved conducting a comparative analysis between the profiles of the source text and the two translations employing House's model (2015) to identify mismatches at the register parameter. The quantitative method was employed to quantify the overtly erroneous errors and determine whether statistically significant differences exist in the mean number of these errors between the two translations. The findings of the study show numerous mismatches, particularly at the three dimensions of register (field, tenor, and mode) which to some extent affected the ideational and interpersonal components of the textual function in both translations. The findings also indicate statistically significant differences between the two translations in terms of the frequency of overtly erroneous errors. The second translation exhibited a higher number of such errors compared to the first translation, primarily resulting from the breach of the target language system. The study concluded that the second translation was less adequate compared to the first translation.

Applying Juliane House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model on Audio-Visual Political Translations of Arab Intermediate Translators

Modern translation devices cannot achieve the expected accuracy as they cannot make up the target text as original as the source text on either the cultural or linguistic level. Translation quality is expected to be a critical academic area, especially concerning audio-visual translation, as it cannot be generated by a machine-translator due to its multidimensional nature. The reason for applying political translation in this study is the linguistic and cultural richness of political discourse, as many political texts are defined and understood in terms of ideology, culture, and political circumstances. The present paper adopts a qualitative aspect. It will be applied through a comparative approach as the study will compare both source text (discourse) and target texts (discourse) according to Juliane House’s model. House’s model is applied due to its comprehensiveness, which analyzes translation according to many aspects including lexical, syntactic, and textual meanings. In addition, House’s model applies the communication theory of “sender-receiver” to the text for defining the accuracy of translation in terms of the relationship between the sender and the receiver. Here, the significance of the study is to testify and examine Juliane House’s as a translation quality assessment model and its efficiency assessing and evaluating audio-visual political translations of Arab intermediate translators.

Research on the Application of Gray Prediction and BP Neural Network in English-Chinese Translation Quality Assessment

Abstract Gray prediction model and BP neural network are increasingly used in many fields as important prediction and analysis tools. The article first elaborates on the related algorithm of the gray prediction method. It constructs the gray prediction model, then constructs the BP neural network, and builds the gray BP neural network translation quality assessment model through the modeling of the simulation of the artificial neural network, and finally takes eight postgraduate students of translation majors of Beijing Foreign Studies University as the subjects, and the eight students translate two articles with similar word counts and difficulties, and score the translation quality of the subjects, and reasonably evaluate and scientifically predict these translations in order to validate the grey translation quality of subjects. The quality of translation is scored, and these translations are reasonably evaluated and scientifically predicted to verify the role and effect of the gray BP neural network in the quality of English-Chinese translation. The study concludes that the results based on the gray prediction model are that the prediction results are in the error range of 0%–7% compared with the original data, and the overall error is small. The prediction results of the compensatory fuzzy neural network prediction model for all 8 subjects before and after translation were more accurate than those predicted by the traditional fuzzy neural network method, with a good fit to the actual monitoring data and a small relative error. Only one subject out of the 8 spent more time on Chapter B than on Chapter A. Chapter B was more time-consuming than Chapter A. The time spent on Chapter A was more than the time spent on Chapter A. Chapter B was more time-consuming than Chapter A. Chapter B was more time-consuming than Chapter A. One subject spent equal time on both articles. The remaining 6 subjects did not spend as much time on chapter B as they did on chapter A.

The Applicability of House’s (2015) Translation Quality Assessment Model on Fiction: Evidence from Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley

Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) is a central concern for both translation practice and academic research. However, the very limited studies assessing the translation quality (TQ) of literary texts, especially fiction, have not accounted for the distinction between the narrative and the character’s dialogue in the assessment. The present study is an attempt to investigate the applicability of House’s (2015) TQA model in assessing the TQ of fiction and to propose modifications. In doing so, we scrutinized the translation quality of Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, translated from Arabic into English, utilizing House’s (2015) TQA model to capture the applicability of the model. The findings reveal that House’s (2015) TQA model accommodates the TQA of fiction. The proposed modifications have implications for both translators and trainers.

Innovative Research on Translation Quality Assessment Models in the New Era

Innovative Research on Translation Quality Assessment Models in the New Era

THE APPLICATION OF HOUSE'S (2015) TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT MODEL TO ARABIC-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Literary translation has gained momentum among scholars and researchers due to the peculiar and ambiguous nature of the literary genre(s). The salient discourse features of these genres do pose serious challenges for translators in their attempting to access the source text and to creatively transfer intentions embedded in the source text to target readerships. The selected work is written by the Sudanese novelist El Tayeb Salih, and translated into English by the Canadian-born British translator, Denys Johnson-Davies. This paper focuses on the relationship between the source text(ST)and the target text(TT) in order to identify mismatches, classify them into overt and covert errors and categorize the related overt errors into seven categories, namely not translated, slight change of meaning, significant change of meaning, distortion of meaning, breach of the target language system, creative translation and cultural filtering. The paper, to some extent, found out that the translator has translated the paper under investigation faithfully, however, a number of mismatches were found and accounted for. And since the translation is intended for a non-Arabic speaker, the translation of specific cultural terms and references should consider the limited cultural background of the target text reader (TT-R) which the translator neglected in some parts of his translation. The analysis can state that the translator is not tied to the culture, community and language of the ST; rather he gave preference more to get comparability of the TT. It was also observed that House's model of Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) is applicable and useful in the field of translation of literary works, for both the translator and the student of translation studies.

Idiom Translation Quality Assessment on “Landline” Novel by Rainbow Rowell

This study aimed at assessing the quality of idiom translation in a novel entitled “Landline” by Rainbow Rowell. By referring to Nababan’s Translation Quality Assessment model (2012), this study assessed the idioms’ translation according to the degree of accuracy, acceptability, and readability. The data analyzed in this study include the idioms and Indonesian translations, as well as the assessment result made by three expert assessors. Those idioms were identified and grouped based on the classification adapted from Palmer (1981). There are 37 idioms found, which consist of 2 idioms that can undergo syntactic changes, 10 idioms with syntactic limitation, 10 frozen idioms, 5 partial idioms, and 10 phrasal verbs. The findings show that the Indonesian translation of those idioms generally has a high-quality level, especially those which were translated into equivalent idioms in the target language. Paraphrasing also plays a major role as a translation strategy used by the translator. However, this strategy may sometimes lead to distortion of the original message in the target language.

COVID-19 crisis communication in Sepedi: the quality of translation by the Limpopo Department of Health

There is a paucity of literature on the importance of translating health risk messages into South Africa’s indigenous languages as a tool for crisis prevention and management. This article focuses on the quality of translations of COVID-19 information from English into Sepedi by the Limpopo Department of Health. Sepedi translations that are already available in the public domain are selected by means of the purposive sampling technique. House’s translation quality assessment (TQA) model is applied to evaluate the quality and accuracy of the translations as part of the strategic crisis response. Based on House’s model, errors in the translations are identified and classified as either ‘dimensional mismatches’ or ‘non-dimensional mismatches’. It is found that, in pursuit of covert translation, the target text from the Limpopo Department of Health does not retain the equivalent function of the source text. It is also observed that House’s model of TQA is applicable and useful in the field of translation of communications of health information. Furthermore, current studies in effective health communication miss the importance of translation during a crisis. Thus, this article bridges this gap by investigating the role of translation during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. The article suggests that future research could investigate the experience of translators during the pandemic.

Contrastive Analysis of English and Arabic Versions of Coelho’s Novel Eleven Minutes

This exploratory research investigates linguistic and cultural challenges in English and Arabic translations of Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s novel, Eleven Minutes, which was originally written in Portuguese. This study raises the following questions: (1) How does the functional-pragmatic model of House prove to be advantageous to the contrastive analysis of translations of Eleven Minutes? (2) To what extent are the translators whose work is examined in the current research faithful to the ST? (3) How intensely are linguistic-textual elements prioritized over cultural aspects in the conveyance of the ST message in either translation? This work employs Juliane House’s model of translation quality assessment to make a comparative analysis of the source text with both translations and to highlight the relationship of linguistic components with the relevant communication process. Furthermore, the techniques adopted in both translations are examined through excerpts taken from each of the three versions of the book. The registers of the source text and those of the target texts are analyzed and compared based on the register analysis of House’s model. Consequently, the study demonstrates how the conceptual and interpersonal functions of language are affected in the target texts. The outcome of this qualitative analysis leads to the identification of the methods adopted by the translators, mainly referring to overt and covert translation methods. Overall, it is concluded that the English translation is significantly linked to the source text by pragmatic equivalence, in contrast, the Arabic translation is connected to the source text by significant functional equivalence that highlights the cultural filter used in the text.

The Impact of Translation Techniques on The Translation Quality in The White Lady’s Subtitle

<p class="LingTeraAbstractBodyEnglish">This study aimed to find out the impact of the translation techniques used by the translator in The White Lady’s subtitles of Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror Game. This study applied descriptive qualitative method. The data in this study were obtained through document analysis and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). The theory of translation techniques used for analysing the technique in this study was proposed by Molina and Albir (2002). This research also assessed the translation quality by using the model of Translation Quality Assessment proposed by Nababan, et al (2012). The translation quality and the assessment were done through FGD with three raters. The result showed that there were 18 techniques applied in the subtitle. This study found that established equivalent affected the translation quality in positive way. Meanwhile, deletion technique gave the bad impact on all aspects of translation quality. This study also discovered the technique namely variant borrowing that was found by Dyah (2019). The average score of accuracy, acceptability, and readability respectively was 2,94, 2,96, and 2,97. Therefore, the score of the translation quality was high with 2.95 of 3.</p>

번역품질평가를 위한 거시평가 모델 개발

This paper aims to develop a holistic model for Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) and examine its reliability. Compared to an analytic method which focuses on translation errors and mistakes, a holistic method allows the assessors to evaluate a translation at text level, and make assessment easier with its high applicability. The holistic model this paper proposes, consists of 7 questions based on important concepts in translation studies; readability, coherence, cohesion, and functionality. The assessors who have over 7 years of translation experience, applied this model to estimate the quality of 30 translations rendered by students. In the reliability measurement of this model, the correlation coefficient among the assessment results of the assessors is verified as over 0.85. Also the correlation coefficient between the results of this model and the results of a comprehensive method which combines an analytic method and a holistic method, is confirmed to be over 0.6. These results suggest that the holistic model of this study is highly reliable and could be applied in TQA practice.

Analyzing the Relationship between Creativity and Translation Quality: A Case Study of Students’ Translations

Creativity is an area that has received limited attention in Translation Studies (TS). One reason for this could be that creativity is a complex concept to define and quantify, but it is also the case that translators are not usually regarded as creators. The present research tries to shed light on how creativity affects translation quality. Moreover, the participants are translation students, which is also rare in studies about this particular topic. The instrument used in this study was the Kaufman Domain of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS) to assess the students’ creativity. Another instrument was Waddington’s model for translation quality assessment. SPSS software version 24 was used to analyze the collected data. Then, the Pearson Correlation Test was employed to find the possible relationship between the variables. The results displayed that among 40 participants involved in this study, their level of creativity was in the range of ‘high’ as much as 60%, ‘very high’ 25%, and ‘medium’ and ‘low’ with 12.5% and 2.5%, respectively. In terms of translation scores, the mean score was 7.18, with the highest score of 8.55 and the lowest at 5.45. As revealed by the Pearson Correlation test, concerning the degree of relationship between variables, there was no significant relationship between creativity and quality. It indicates that more creative participants did not necessarily perform better in the work of translating. A recommendation is made for future researchers to involve more variables as well as a greater number of participants to enrich the research results and increase the likelihood of creating generalizations regarding the correlation between creativity and translation results.

Equivalence and Translation Quality Assessment towards News Translation:

This study aims to determine the type of equivalence contained in the news translation of VICE Indonesia YouTube channel and its impact on the translation quality. The data was taken from the subtitle transcript of VICE Indonesia. This research is conducted with qualitative descriptive method. Several theories are elaborated within this research namely, Nida & Taber theory of equivalence (cited in Panou, 2013, p.2) and the equivalence theory of Baker (2018), and the adopted model of translation quality assessment from Nababan et al. (2012). The results of this study showed that there are six types of equivalence found within the subtitles: formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, equivalence at word level, equivalence above word level, grammatical equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence. Grammatical equivalence is the type that dominates the overall data. Furthermore, the findings shows that 66.67% of samples were categorized as less communicative, 58.33% of samples were evaluated as unacceptable translations, and 38.89% of the sample scored as high readability level.

Transcreating humour for (re)dubbing into Arabic

The transfer of humorous elements in audio-visual texts is a challenging task as verbal expressions heavily rely on witty wordplay and are visually bound. To overcome such a challenge, the translator has to have two particular skills: creativity and a thorough understanding of the context and/or intended meanings. This paper aims at investigating the realisation of humour in dubbing animation vis-à-vis register variation and creativity by comparing the Egyptian dub with the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) re-dub of Disney’s Monster’s Inc. Drawing on House’s (2015) translation quality assessment model, the data analysis reveals that resorting to colloquialism as a covert translation strategy provided a functionally adequate, nuanced leeway for the translator to capture the essence situational humour of the source text by relying on the on-screen visuals. Therefore, the translator quasi-assumes the role of an author to communicate interpersonal meanings as effectively and humorously as possible. Meanwhile, resorting to the standard variation as an overt translation strategy significantly deflated and sacrificed verbal humour due to the translator’s literal style and Al-Jazeera’s ideological orientation that shuns functional equivalence for the sake of linguistic homogenisation.

Quality of Post-Edited Interlingual Subtitling: FAR Model, Translator’s Assessment and Audience Reception

This paper analyzes the quality of machine translated interlingual subtitles, which were post-edited in the language pair EN/PT-BR. Our analyses applied the FAR model, a Translation Quality Assessment Model, to the PT-BR subtitles of The Red Sea Diving Resort movie trailer, correlating it to empirical data collected with translators (quality assessment) and audience (reception). Reception data was collected with undergraduate students, which were divided into two groups: the control group that watched the subtitled trailer available on Netflix; and the experimental group that watched the trailer with post-edited subtitles. Quality data was collected with translators and they watched the trailer with post-edited subtitles. We used a 5-point Likert-type scale, a questionnaire and a guided think-aloud protocol to collect our data. Data collected with both translators and students were correlated with the FAR model error scores (Functional Equivalence, Acceptability and Readability). Our results indicate that the post-edited subtitles had good quality in terms of meaning and target language norms; however, the technical parameters had lower quality, which affected the trailer appreciation as reported by most of the audience. Due to the small sample size, further empirical studies are required to obtain solid standards for assessing the quality of post-edited subtitles.

The Application of House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model in Chinese-English Translation

This article analyses the theoretical basis behind Juliane House’s translation quality assessment model, illustrates its operation, and verifies the application of this model to English translations of Chinese prose works by assessing the quality of Zhang Peiji’s English translation of Ba Jin’s Carpenter Lao Chen, and evaluates the quality of the translation. Overall, the source text (ST) of Carpenter Lao Chen and the target text (TT) are functionally equivalent, and the translation is an overt translation with a high quality.

ASSESSING THE TRANSLATION OF COLLOCATIONS IN LITERARY TEXTS BASED ON JULIANE HOUSE’S MODEL (1997) OF TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT

The purpose of this study was to assess the translation of collocations from Arabic into English in literary texts, which are considered as a rich source of culture and fixed expressions. The methodology of this study is a descriptive- interpretive analysis of the source text (ST), which is the Arabic novel “Awlad Hartna” and the target texts (TTs), which are the English translations “Children of Gebelawi” and “Children of the Alley”. The author applied House’s (1997) model of translation quality assessment. The analysis was divided into two sections, (1) analyzing the ST and TTs according to their register and genre to find the overt errors, and (2) examining the translation of collocations to find the covert errors. The result of the study revealed that that the two translations have many mismatches at the level of field, tenor and mode, such as the lexical, cultural, linguistic and syntactic mismatches. The findings also reveal that translators have committed 106 collocational errors which were divided into four categories: not translated, slight change in meaning, significant change in meaning and distortion of meaning. The findings of the study have pedagogical implications for translators in general, translators of literature, translations students and teachers.

A Study on Chinese-English Machine Translation Based on Transfer Learning and Neural Networks

The existing Chinese-English machine translation has problems such as inaccurate word translation and difficult translation of long sentences. To this end, this paper proposes a new machine translation model based on bidirectional Chinese-English translation incorporating translation knowledge and transfer learning, and the components of this model include a recurrent neural network-based translation quality assessment model and a self-focused network-based model. The experimental results demonstrate that our method works better on the dataset of machine translation quality assessment task for Chinese-English translation with more information, and the Pearson correlation coefficient of its quality assessment feature vector (such as word prediction vector representation) is higher.