Translation Quality Assessment

Abstract

The relevance of, and justification for, translation quality assessment (TQA) is stronger than ever: professional translators, their clients, translatological researchers and trainee translators all rely on TQA for different reasons. Yet whereas there is general agreement about the need for a translation to be "good," "satisfactory" or "acceptable," the definition of acceptability and of the means of determining it are matters of ongoing debate. National and international translation standards now exist, but there are no generally accepted objective criteria for evaluating the quality of translations. What are the problems and issues that stand in the way of consensus and coherence in TQA? This article presents an updated argumentation-centred model to solve some of those problems.

Keywords

• acceptability
• translation standards
• evaluation criterion
• argumentation-centred model