Institutional Translation and Interpreting

Assessing Practices and Managing for Quality

Fernando Prieto Ramos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429559914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

This collection brings together new insights around current translation and interpreting practices in national and supranational settings. The book illustrates the importance of further reflection on issues around quality and assessment, given the increased development of resources for translators and interpreters. The first part of the volume focuses on these issues as embodied in case studies from a range of national and regional contexts, including Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United States. The second part takes a broader perspective to look at best practices and questions of quality through the lens of international bodies and organizations and the shifting roles of translation and interpreting practitioners in working to manage these issues. Taken together, this collection demonstrates the relevance of critically examining processes, competences and products in current institutional translation and interpreting settings at the national and supranational levels, paving the way for further research and quality assurance strategies in the field.

The Introduction, Chapter 7, and Conclusion of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Translation and Interpreting for National and Regional Institutions

1 A Comparative Approach to Assessing Assessment
Revising the Scoring Chart for the Authorized Translator’s Examination in Finland

Leena Salmi and Marja Kivilehto

DOI: 10.4324/9780429264894-3

1.1 Introduction

There is a broad scope of translation quality assessment, and it can occur in various contexts: translator training, machine translation and technical communication, to give a few examples (e.g. Angelelli and Jacobson 2009; Gouadec 2010). Our focus in this chapter is on assessment related to translator certification: the assessment system in the Authorized Translator’s Examination in Finland. This examination determines whether the examinees have the professional competence needed for producing so-called “official” or “certified” translations (i.e. legally valid for certain purposes and institutions), but the context can also be considered pedagogical to some extent, since the examinees who fail receive feedback that highlights their abilities and shortcomings (cf. Saldanha and O’Brien 2013, 96).

In our previous articles (Kivilehto and Salmi 2017; Salmi and Kivilehto 2018), we have discussed the assessment system of the Finnish Authorized Translator’s Examination and compared it to assessment systems in other certification examinations. The system itself, in its present form since 2008, has been described by Salmi and Penttilä (2013), and is the topic of a recent publication (in Finnish) by the Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) (see Hiirikoski 2017; Kemppanen 2017; Miettunen 2017). We have also examined how a sample of translations have been assessed in the examination. Our purpose has been to gain more information for developing the assessment system of the Finnish examination to make it more valid and reliable, as we have noticed some validity- and reliability-related problems in how the assessment has been applied to translations in the examination (Kivilehto and Salmi 2017).

The scoring chart for assessing translations in the examination was revised in 2017. Previously, the chart comprised two parts, and the translations were marked for both content (C-errors) and language quality (A-errors). The scoring chart currently has three parts, taking into account task accomplishment (T-errors), equivalence of content (C-errors), and acceptability and readability (A-errors). The previous chart contained 14 error types (see the full chart in Kivilehto and Salmi 2017), while the new one contained only seven.

This chapter presents a comparison of the scoring charts before and after 2017. We describe our process of revising the scoring chart and analyze how it has been applied. The purpose of the comparison is to see if the assessment in the examinations should be further developed, and if so, in what way. In our earlier work, we have discussed similar systems in use elsewhere (e.g. Norway, Germany, Canada or the United States; see Kivilehto and Salmi 2017; Salmi and Kivilehto 2018), and this chapter describes that of the Australian National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI), as a possible way of developing the assessment.

1.2 Translation Quality Assessment in Translator’s Examinations

1.2.1 Assessment Practices

Translation quality assessment can be product-, process- and/or user-oriented. Product-oriented assessment is usually based on text analysis and comparing source and target texts (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013, 98–99). One of the best-known, text-based models is that of House (2015), who approaches assessment from the perspective of systemic-functional linguistics and calls her model functional-pragmatic. The principal assessment criterion in House’s model is functional equivalence, which can only be reached in translation that is not source culture dependent, i.e. covert translation (House 2015, 60). Otherwise what we are dealing with are different kinds of versions (House 2015, 59). As for process-oriented assessment, it takes a holistic approach to assessment and emphasizes contextual factors such as translator competence and the context in which translations are produced. Examples of process-oriented assessment systems are standards such as the ISO 17100. User-oriented assessment, for its part, focuses on factors such as readability, acceptability and usability, and approaches assessment from an individual’s point of view. This means that assessment is related to individual user attributes: reading skills and motivation for reading the translation (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013, 99–100). User-oriented assessment is taken one step further by Suojanen, Koskinen and Tuominen (2015), who introduce practical methods for user-centered translation.

When assessing translations, it is recommended to pay attention to the assessment setting, those doing the translation and the genre and purpose of the translation (House 2015). This applies to examination contexts as well. In the case of the Authorized Translator’s Examination in Finland, the texts to be translated fall into the category of legal texts, and thus special attention must be paid to strategies of translating legal texts. According to Vanden Bulcke and Héroguel (2011, 241), four aspects should be taken into account when assessing translations of legal texts: legal texts as category, genre characteristics, text function and translation strategies. When it comes to certified translations, they often fall into the category of judicial texts (e.g. summons, pronouncements and judgments) and texts that are applications of law (e.g. official documents, contracts and wills). This implies that translations are to be authentic translations that describe the reality of the source text (ST) as closely as possible (Vanden Bulcke and Héroguel 2011, 234, 243). Undoubtedly, the translations must be comprehensible for end users, but as the end users are often experts of the field in question, they may be expected to have the prior knowledge needed for interpreting legal texts of different legal systems. Authenticity, for its part, amounts to foreignizing as a translation strategy. Translations should correspond to STs as closely as possible even with regard to macro- and microstructures, i.e. text structure, phraseology, terminology, syntax and style (Vanden Bulcke and Héroguel 2011, 214). This view is also shared in studies with Danish lawyers and legal translators as informants (Hjort-Pedersen 2016).

Assessment models can roughly be categorized as analytical or holistic (Lommel et al. 2015). Analytic assessment focuses “on the identification of precise issues within the object being assessed, such as (for a translation) identification of specific mistranslations, spelling errors,” whereas holistic assessment emphasizes “overall characteristics of the object being assessed, such as (in the case of translated texts) reader impression, sentiment, clarity, accuracy, style, whether it enables a task to be completed, and so forth” (Lommel et al. 2015, Section 1.3.2). In assessing certified translation, it is justified to use an analytic rather than a holistic model, since precision is highly valued. Analytic assessment often results in error analysis rather than a comparison of the translation against “ideal” criteria that describe either what the translation should be like or the translation skills it should demonstrate (Angelelli 2009, 40–41; Turner, Lai, and Huang 2010). Error analysis has been regarded as a valid way of measuring translation quality, and this is why it is used in many certification examinations (cf. Hale et al. 2012, 58). An example of this is the certification examination managed by the American Translators Association (ATA 2017). Nevertheless, criterion-referenced assessment can be as valid as error-based assessment (Turner, Lai, and Huang 2010), and at least one certification system, that of the Australian NAATI, has adopted criterion-referenced assessment.

1.2.2 Assessment in NAATI Certification Examination

In this section, we discuss the assessment of the Australian certification examination of NAATI. The reason for choosing the NAATI assessment is the fact that it is criterion-referenced, and we see this as one possibility for developing the assessment of the Finnish Authorized Translator’s Examination.

In Australia, the certification examination offered by NAATI takes place several times a year in different language combinations (NAATI 2020a) and has three levels of translator certifications: Certified Advanced Translator, Certified Translator and Recognized Practicing Translator (NAATI 2020b). The Certified Advanced Translator test consists of three tasks: two translations of texts of 400 words and one revision of a translation of 400 words. All STs are written by specialists for specialist readers. They can be research papers, legal briefs or trade agreements, to name a few examples. The test duration is eight hours (NAATI 2020c). The Certified Translator test consists of two translation tasks and one revision task, but the STs are non-specialized texts and shorter (about 250 words) than those in the Certified Advanced Translator test, and they deal with different topics and represent different domains. The domains range from government, legal, health, technology and science to business, society, culture, social services and immigration. The test duration is three and a half hours. In both tests, computers may be used and all kinds of reference materials are allowed. However, neither the use of the Internet nor contacting other people is permitted (NAATI 2020d). For Recognized Practicing Translators, there is no certification test.

The assessment methods of both the translation and revision tasks are criterion-referenced. Two criteria are applied, which means that two competencies are assessed: transfer competency and language competency. For translation tasks, transfer competency means competency in transferring the meaning of the ST, following the translation brief and applying textual norms and conventions, whereas for revision tasks, it means revision skills and competency in applying knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Assessing Practices in Institutional Translation and Interpreting
• Part I Translation and Interpreting for National and Regional Institutions
• Part II Translation and Interpreting at International Institutions
• Managing for Quality: Practical Lessons from Research Insights
• Index