TRANSLATION QUALITY EVALUATION: THE PROBLEM OF FINDING EFFECTIVE STANDARDS, CRITERIA AND PARAMETERS
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2022-1-54-64
Introduction. Translation being one of the oldest types of activities is getting particular importance in the modern global world. Translators face the need to accelerate the translation speed, since the development of science, industry, trade, and other spheres of modern society depends on the speed and quality of translation of large amounts of information into different languages. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure the quality of translation under such conditions. The very concept of translation quality, although it has been the object of research for many years, is still not clearly defined, while there are different approaches to evaluating the quality of translation in general and specifically there is no single concept of the quality of written translations and a single generally accepted classification of translation errors. This means that such evaluations are not unified and their use may be doubtful. Aim and objectives. The aim of the article is to compare the main approaches to translation quality evaluation as well as existing standards, criteria and parameters for translation quality evaluation. Research methods. The research has used general scientific (methods of logic: analysis, synthesis, generalization); specific scientific (linguistic) methods: descriptive, comparative. Results and discussion. Translation theorists offer several approaches to evaluating the translation quality, which can be reduced to two large groups: quantitative and non-quantitative approaches. To regulate the quality of translations, different states have developed their own regulatory documents and standards. These documents differ significantly from each other: some documents contain requirements for the translation performed (European Translation Quality Standard), others list the types of translation and specify their difference from each other (Russian National Standards), others do not contain exact criteria for quality translation, but provide a list of provisions that need to be taken into account before translating, and also describe in detail the structure of the translation project (American Quality Standard). Conclusion. Organizations engaged in translation in practice use a wide range of national and international translation quality standards, quality evaluation scales, as well as modern tools to quantify the translation quality, i.e. special computer programs to evaluate the quality of translations. The criteria to evaluate the quality of such tools are translation errors, the classifications and typologies of which are presented in a huge number. The absence of a single standard of quality and the periodic inventions of new tools for evaluation of the translation quality are caused by the variety of criteria imposed on the quality of different texts (differ both in theme and function or style). Despite the obvious failure to cover the full range of possible criteria for the qualitative translation of the entire variety of texts, a quantitative evaluation of the formal component of the quality of translated texts is being implemented everywhere.
Keywords: evaluation of translation quality, written translation, quality standards, quality criteria, quality parameters
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Issue: 1, 2022
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
Pages: 54 — 64
Downloads: 680