Argumentation-based literary translation quality assessment

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Kharmandar
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Translated Literature

This study correlates argumentation, translation, and literature to construct a new model for assessing the quality of translated literature. Literary translation is described as being compatible with the rhetorical stream of argumentation studies, while the study rests on the overriding notion of ethics of difference in argumentative cross-cultural and translational encounters. The model incorporates ethics of difference and interpretive act, pragma-dialectical contributions of scheme/structure and rhetorical/dialectical situations, and aesthetic features including figures of speech and (sub)genres of literature. Application of the model to an English translation of a classical poem (a Rumi’s allegory) shows that the model can be systematically applied to quality assessment of translated literature (and literary genres e.g. plays, novels, audiovisual/cinematic products, etc.). Considering the implications and suggestions for further research, the study can progressively develop into a literary or cross-linguistic subgenre of argumentation theory, with implications for comparative literature, philosophy of meaning, translation theory, and dialectical hermeneutics.

scholarly journals AN ASSESSMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION OF “THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN - CHAPTER XX” USING HOUSE’S TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT MODEL

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoang Thi Diem Hang
Keyword(s):  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Assessment Model ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

It is common for people to approach a foreign literary work via its translation; therefore, whether the readers can enjoy a translation text that successfully conveys the author’s intention is a concern to many researchers. In this study, with a view to assess the quality of the translation of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, the researcher utilizes the schema of Translation Quality Assessment proposed by House. The application of House’s Translation Quality Assessment shows that although the translation text achieves some success and  conveys most of the author’s message, it still reveals a number of mismatches in comparison with the source text, among which the inability to render America-African vernacular language results in a great loss of the target text. In addition, the ideational component of the translation text is also affected by overtly erroneous mistakes. On the basis of such findings, implications for literary translation are drawn.

scholarly journals Translation Quality Assessment in Health Research: A Functionalist Alternative to Back-Translation

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Colina ◽  
Nicole Marrone ◽  
Maia Ingram ◽  
Daisey Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Cross Cultural Research ◽  
Back Translation

As international research studies become more commonplace, the importance of developing multilingual research instruments continues to increase and with it that of translated materials. It is therefore not unexpected that assessing the quality of translated materials (e.g., research instruments, questionnaires, etc.) has become essential to cross-cultural research, given that the reliability and validity of the research findings crucially depend on the translated instruments. In some fields (e.g., public health and medicine), the quality of translated instruments can also impact the effectiveness and success of interventions and public campaigns. Back-translation (BT) is a commonly used quality assessment tool in cross-cultural research. This quality assurance technique consists of (a) translation (target text [TT1]) of the source text (ST), (b) translation (TT2) of TT1 back into the source language, and (c) comparison of TT2 with ST to make sure there are no discrepancies. The accuracy of the BT with respect to the source is supposed to reflect equivalence/accuracy of the TT. This article shows how the use of BT as a translation quality assessment method can have a detrimental effect on a research study and proposes alternatives to BT. One alternative is illustrated on the basis of the translation and quality assessment methods used in a research study on hearing loss carried out in a border community in the southwest of the United States.

Development of a method for assessing the quality of machine translation based on ensemble methods in machine learning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.V. Kozina ◽  
Yu.S. Belov
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Translation System ◽  
Human Judgment ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Machine Translation System ◽  
Translation Systems

Automatically assessing the quality of machine translation is an important yet challenging task for machine translation research. Translation quality assessment is understood as predicting translation quality without reference to the source text. Translation quality depends on the specific machine translation system and often requires post-editing. Manual editing is a long and expensive process. Since the need to quickly determine the quality of translation increases, its automation is required. In this paper, we propose a quality assessment method based on ensemble supervised machine learning methods. The bilingual corpus WMT 2019 for the EnglishRussian language pair was used as data. The text data volume is 17089 sentences, 85% of the data was used for training, and 15% for testing the model. Linguistic functions extracted from the text in the source and target languages were used as features for training the system, since it is these characteristics that can most accurately characterize the translation in terms of quality. The following tools were used for feature extraction: a free language modeling tool based on SRILM and a Stanford POS Tagger parts of speech tagger. Before training the system, the text was preprocessed. The model was trained using three regression methods: Bagging, Extra Tree, and Random Forest. The algorithms were implemented in the Python programming language using the Scikit learn library. The parameters of the random forest method have been optimized using a grid search. The performance of the model was assessed by the mean absolute error MAE and the root mean square error RMSE, as well as by the Pearsоn coefficient, which determines the correlation with human judgment. Testing was carried out using three machine translation systems: Google and Bing neural systems, Mouses statistical machine translation systems based on phrases and based on syntax. Based on the results of the work, the method of additional trees showed itself best. In addition, for all categories of indicators under consideration, the best results are achieved using the Google machine translation system. The developed method showed good results close to human judgment. The system can be used for further research in the task of assessing the quality of translation.

IQ and Reading Comprehension in Translation Quality

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Askari ◽  
Azam Samadi Rahim
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Significant Finding ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Determining Factors ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices

Having a deeper understanding of determining factors in the quality of translation is in the interest of almost all scholars of translation studies. Students’ intelligence is being measured constantly in order to determine their aptitude for entering into different programs. However, in translation studies, the variable of intelligence quotient (IQ) has been curiously ignored among researchers. This study aimed to explore the strength of both IQ and reading comprehension in predicting translation quality among Iranian translation students.  A sample of forty-six translation students from Alborz University of Qazvin participated in this study. Data were collected using three tests including Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, Colina’s (2008) componential translation quality rating scheme and the reading comprehension test of IELTS. The results show IQ test scores and reading comprehension significantly predict translation quality assessment. Surprisingly, the most significant finding is that IQ score is by far a better predictor of translation quality than reading comprehension. Overall, it is concluded that translation quality assessment is more of a deeper cognitive function than solely language process, which could lead to more research on cognitive aspects of translation.

scholarly journals Yuri Tynyanov’s comparative studies in the light of translation theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-276
Author(s):  
Alexej I. Zherebin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Studies ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analytical Strategies ◽  
Translated Literature

Against the background of the latest trends in the field of translation theory, the article attempts to distinguish between the terms “translation studies” and “translatology”. The material for analysis is a number of authoritative studies by Russian and foreign authors, in which literary translation and translated literature are considered as a fact of cultural transfer and the subject of comparative literary studies. Variants of the translatological approach are illustrated by an example from George Steiner’s monograph After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) and Yuri Lotman’s “‘Journey to the Island of Love’ by Vasily Trediakovsky and the function of translated literature in Russian culture of the first half of the 18th century” (1985). The central part of the article is devoted to the comparative studies of Yuri Tynyanov in the early 1920s. An example of a more traditional translation approach is given by Tynyanovs study “Tyutchev and Heine” (1922), a classic example of Russian comparative studies that confirms the thesis that the delimitation and differentiated use of the terms “translation studies” and “translatology” allow us to more accurately describe the semantic structure of both scientific texts and those works of art to which they are devoted. On the contrary, in Tynyanovs study “Blok and Heine” (1921), which is close in theme and when created, both analytical strategies are present on equal terms; translation studies and translatology complement each other, forming a synthesis. A typological comparison includes both observations of Block’s translation strategy, supported by an aesthetic analysis of the works of both poets, and the posing of the question of the social function of art and the role of the artist in shaping the modernist metanarrative of personality emancipation.

scholarly journals Translating The Waste Land: Literal accuracy, poetic fidelity and cross-cultural communication

Literator ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
A. Wessels
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Impact

The author of this article published an Afrikaans translation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1992. This article is a personal contemplation and evaluation of the process of literary translation as experienced in the particular case, referring to aspects of translation theory where relevant. It discusses the unremitting balancing act that literary translation requires, where the translator has to pose the need for as close a literal translation as possible against the need to render, again as faithfully as possible, the comprehensive poetic effect of the work, as regards, for example, stylistic features, emotive force and symbolic significance. Through all of this runs the thread of (a sometimes unconscious) transculturation of the work, partly the result of the desire on the part of the translator to communicate the impact of the poem as successfully as possible to a specific audience with a specific cultural identity and cultural presuppositions. Sometimes the inescapable interpretative nature of literary translation could be attributable to the cultural identity of the translator himself and sometimes it could be the result of the innate cultural dimensions or temper of the recipient language. The problems encountered, solutions arrived at and transcultural evolution effected are illustrated from the (original and translated) texts.

scholarly journals Assessing the English Translation of BFSU’s New Motto

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Zuqiong Ma
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Modified Model ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Chinese University ◽  
Marketing Tool

<p>The motto is a potent marketing tool in today’s globalized site of higher education. Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) adopted a new motto in 2011 to reflect its new self-branding as a cosmopolitan scholar-doer. Its English translation has since then triggered much discussion about quality assessment. The current study critically surveys the existing literature on translation quality assessment (TQA), in an effort to identify an appropriate framework to assess the translation of Chinese university mottos. House’s model (2015) is found the most appropriate and applied to the official translation of the BFSU motto, after being adjusted in two important aspects. One, in regard to the rise of English as a language of global communication, it is proposed that more broad-based English norms than those of English as a native language be established for the purpose of adjudicating cultural filtering. Two, the use of corpus-based contrastive pragmatics is expanded to gauge the justifiability of overt as well as covert mismatches. While the errors identified by such a modified model are better intersubjectively verifiable, it remains to see how social research can be incorporated into the system to assess the degrees different errors may impact on the perceived quality of a translation.</p>

scholarly journals The Application of Register Analysis into Translation Quality Assessment

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1550
Author(s):  
Ningwei Yang
Keyword(s):  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Field Mode ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Register Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Level

Register analysis, an essential part of SFL, is composed of three variables, that is, field, mode and tenor. According to SFL, register forms the interface between the social system and the linguistic system; its elements realize social meanings and are realized in linguistic forms. In the process of translating, translators by and large confront problems not only at the linguistic level but also cultural level. As a powerful tool, register theory is practical and necessary to be introduced into translation studies. This paper tries to explore literary translation from the perspective of SFL and evaluate the version of Beiying by Zhang Peiji respectively from the field, mode and tenor. Based on findings, it is safe to say that register analysis to some degree makes a valuable contribution to translation quality assessment (TQA).

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