A Summative Translation Quality Assessment Model for Undergraduate Student Translations: Objectivity Versus Manageability

Abstract

Various scholars from different schools of thought have proposed criteria and/ or models or translation assessment. Surprisingly, almost none of them are tailor-made for a manageable summative evaluation of student translation. That is why most translation teachers still draw on holistic and traditional methods of translation evaluation in their exams. These methods are either too holistic or too detailed (and complex) for translation evaluation purposes in educational settings. The holistic approaches that verge on subjectivity are quite manageable for a teacher who is to evaluate of a score of students, whereas the detailed and quantitative models, which are highly demanding on the limited resources of a classroom teacher, are considered highly objective. Feeling the need for a model, which is both manageable and objective, this study aims at reaching a compromise between the subjectivity and the complexity of these approaches to translation evaluation. Our proposed model draws on and combines the five linguistic equivalences introduced by Koller (1979) and the five-leveled holistic scheme for translation evaluation proposed by Waddington (2001).

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.26.12421