The judge and the quality of the translation. Serial - episode 1: Fields & co

CamelThe judge and the quality of the translation. An exciting serial in eight episodes written by Isabelle Bambust.

In this first episode you will get acquainted with the main actors Fields & co and you are immediately confronted with different views on translation quality.

Ghent, Isabelle Bambust - Is all translation and interpreting always and everywhere of high quality? No. But assessing the quality of a translation is a tricky thing. It depends on what you mean by quality and how you approach translation quality.

 

No judgment without translation theory

To assess the quality of a translation, you always consciously or unconsciously rely on a translation theory. A translation theory is a set of theoretical views on translation. These views then determine your translation strategies. A translation strategy is a way in which you can translate a text based on a translation theory. The result can then be assessed on the basis of the translated theory applied and the related strategies.

 

No translation theory without environmental factors

With regard to the source text, a translation has new environmental factors. First of all, we have the time. By definition, a translation always exists later in time than the original text(1).  There is also the obvious role of the other language in which the original text is translated.

With these two factors – the other time and the other language – the question arises whether you should translate source (language) oriented or target (language) oriented.

Specifically: how do you translate a text from 1972 today? So do you hint at the year 1972 in your translation and opt for a historifying approach? Or do you consider the year in which the translation is done? This is called an updating approach.

As for the other language factor, another question arises: should there be a cultural trace of the source language in the translation (alienation) or not (domestic transposition)?

 

It is not over yet

As a translator, you can historize, update, alienate or domesticate. Moreover, you can do that in different levels. And you can also combine: a historifying alienating translation(2) for example, or a historifying domesticating translation (3), or an updating alienating translation(4), or an updating domesticating translation(5).

In any case, we often find these polarities in different translation theories.

 

Not having an overview

In all honesty, I have not seen or read all the possible translation theories.

I have seen the text-analytical functional approach, the hermeneutic approach, the relevance theory to name a few more. After a while I could only see the overivew with great difficulty, and then not at all...

 

Phew! Adequacy as synthesis

I saw the light at the end of the tunnel with David Horton. He sees a greatest common denominator between all translation theoretical approaches: the adequacy of the target text with regard to the source text. In concrete terms, the language, meaning and sentence structure of the target text are compared with that of the source text. This comparison test also takes into account the cultural framework, the possibilities of the target language, and also the function of the target text(6).

But also in this case it is possible to make a translation more source-oriented or more target-oriented.

 

A new broadened quality approach

Ultimately, I find support in Paul Fields and his colleagues who apply general quality management to the translation industry(7).

They assume the quality model of David Garvin (Harvard Business School). According to this model, there are five possible approaches that are not separated from each other:

1) The transcendent approach finds quality difficult to define in itself, but you recognize it when you see it. That sounds rather abstract, but specifically applied to the translation sector it means that the quality of a translation is reflected by the expertise of the translator. If the translator is top quality, his translation work will also be (as naturally): "If the translator is an expert professional, then the target text will be excellent and its quality need not to be measured, even if such measurement were possible(8)."

2) The product-based approach looks at the product. In the translation sector this is therefore the translation. In this approach, if the translation shows certain characteristics, for example a smooth readability, the quality meets a good agreement with the source text.

3) The user-based approach assumes that the translation must meet the needs of the end user.

4) The production-based approach examines whether certain good processes were complied with. In the translation sector, such standard procedures exist, for example ISO 17100 Translation services – Requirements for translation services(9).

5) The value-based approach deals with the economic value of the translation. The higher the economic value, the higher the quality of the translation. "(...) The value approach asserts that a translation's economic benefit to the requester must exceed its cost. Otherwise, the translation is unattractive and undesirable; it lacks sufficient value(10)."

 

In this serial we analyse case per case how the judge handles translation quality. We use Fields & co's different quality approaches as a thread.

The second episode takes place in court. It immediately appears that translation quality in court is not the same as outside the court.

 

The judge and the quality of the translation. Serial (Introduction)

 

(1) D. Weidner, Traduction et survie. Walter Benjamin reads Marcel Proust, Paris, Éditions de l'éclat, 2015, 47: "(...) Benjamin, (...) through the subject of time, (...) shows how translation is, by nature, historical (...)."

(2) Where both the time aspect and the other language given focuses on the original text.

(3) Where the time aspect focuses on the original text, and the other language given to the target text.

(4) Where the time aspect focuses on the target text, and the other language given to the original text.

(5) Where both the time aspect and the other language given focus on the target text.

(6) M. MAGRIS, "La valutazione della qualità della traduzione nella teoria e nelle pratica" in G. BENELLI and G. TONINI (eds.), Studi in ricordo di Carmen Sànchez Montero, Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2006, 183-184.

(7) P. FIELDS, D. HAGUE, G.S. KOBY, A. LOMMEL, A. MELBY, "What is Quality? A Management Discipline and the Translation Industry Get Acquainted", Revista Tradumàtica: tecnologies de la traducció, 2014, 404-412.

(8) P. FIELDS, D. HAGUE, G.S. KOBY, A. LOMMEL, A. MELBY, "What is Quality? A Management Discipline and the Translation Industry Get Acquainted", Revista Tradumàtica: tecnologies de la traducció, 2014, 408.

(9) See https://www.iso.org/standard/59149.html.

(10) P. FIELDS, D. HAGUE, G.S. KOBY, A. LOMMEL, A. MELBY, "What is Quality? A Management Discipline and the Translation Industry Get Acquainted", Revista Tradumàtica: tecnologies de la traducció, 2014, 410.

 


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Author: Isabelle Bambust

Machine translation: SDL Machine Translation (previously SDL BeGlobal)

Post-editing: Quick Post Editor 10

Source language: Nederlands (nl)


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