Wang, C. 2015. Quantifying Assessment Criteria in Translator Training Courses: A Step Forward for Translator Trainers and Translator Users to Meet. New perspectives in assessment in translation training: Bridging the gap between academic and professional assessment. University of Westminster, London 04 Sep 2015
| Title | Quantifying Assessment Criteria in Translator Training Courses: A Step Forward for Translator Trainers and Translator Users to Meet |
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| Authors | Wang, C. |
| Type | Conference paper |
| Abstract | ‘[E]valuation is part and parcel of the teacher’s job’ ((Nord 1997:42). In the context of translation, the industry also joins in the evaluation process, more often with even more strict criteria for the quality of a translation text (e.g. O’Brien 2012, Stejskal 2007). It follows that the assessment criteria for assessing trainee translators’ work and professional translators’ should best echo each other, because translator training courses supply translators for the industry, who selects the latter based on their academic merits, while professional translators, who in modern times have vast mostly completed a training course beforehand, make their decisions as to how and what to translate when given a source text on the basis of what they have been taught. In this paper, I will review the assessment criteria for assessing trainee translators and compare them with the evaluation criteria used by the translation industry. I will argue that the approach of error typology for assessment typically used in various industrial models is a possible point where the industrial sphere and the academic sphere can meet for potentially ‘harmonious’ guidelines in assessing translation quality. I will propose that as a step forward to bridge the gap between academic and professional assessment, criteria for assessing trainee translators adopt a quantification model built on the error typology notion. |
| Year | 2015 |
| Conference | New perspectives in assessment in translation training: Bridging the gap between academic and professional assessment |