1 / 17

Holistic vs Analytical Assessment in Legal Translation

This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of holistic and analytical assessment methods in legal translation. It presents a research study on both approaches and discusses their implications in translation studies and professional practice. The study reveals subjective and variable results in holistic assessment, while analytical assessment shows variation in overall results. The article suggests the need for holistic assessment as a supplementary method in translation quality assurance.

millieh
Download Presentation

Holistic vs Analytical Assessment in Legal Translation

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Holistic vs AnalyticalAssessment in Legal Translation Carmen Valero-Garcés & Francisco Vigier – University of Alcalá Mary Phelan – Dublin City University

  2. Assessment in TranslationStudies and Professional Practice • IntroductiontoHA • ResearchStudyon HA in Legal Translation • Introductionto AA • ResearchStudyon AA in Legal Translation • Conclusions

  3. Assessment in TranslationStudies and Professional Practice • Underresearched area • Commonproblems in TQA (Williams 2009) • Theevaluator • Level of target languagerigour • Seriousness of errors • Sampling vs full-textassessment • Quantification of quality • TQA purpose

  4. WhatisHolisticAssessment? • Theevaluatorgives a TT a rating (0-10) orevaluativeletter (e.g. A = excellent, B = verygood) basedonanoverallimpression • Frequentlyused in both academia and industry • Advantages less time-consuming and assessment of translations at thediscourse/textlevelnot at thesentence/wordlevel (Garant 2009) • Someattempts of systematization (Waddington, 2001) • Disadvantages subjective, hencearbitrary, intuitive, unscientific, unsystematic and unreliable; doesnotprovide a clearjustification of theresult (Waddington 2001)

  5. ResearchStudyon HA in Legal Translation • Analysestrengths and weaknesses of holisticmethodsfortheassessment of legal translation ( interraterreliability) • One of the WS1 essentialdocumentstranslatedintoSP by a studenton MA in Translation • Thattranslationassessednumerically (0-10) by ten evaluators • Evaluatorssurveyedontheirassessmentmethod

  6. Results • Numericassessment

  7. Results (2) • Survey • Mostevaluatorsrankedpragmaticerrors as thosewithhighestrelevance and linguisticerrors as thosewithlowestrelevance • Verydifferentopinionsexpressedbyrespondents as tothetranslation’sstrengths and weaknesses (i.e.“The message is appropriately conveyed. It fulfills its communicative function” vs. “Errors regarding sense, coherence, punctuation... A poor quality translation”  assessmentisbasedon personal criteria, thussubjective and variable

  8. Analytical Assessment Analytical Assessment

  9. ATA • ATA system – (a) grid, (b) flowchart and (c) Explanation of Error Categories

  10. ATA Grid

  11. ATA flowchart

  12. UAH text – holistic - 532 words in ST • DCU text – analytical – 256 words in ST • 5 assessors – three in Europe plus two ATA assessors

  13. Evaluators’ Verdicts

  14. Conclusions • HA: subjective method with a low degree of inter-rater reliability • Cost and time efficiency  HA as supplementary method for LT assessment? • AA: even though the system appears self-explanatory, there is a lot of variation in the overall result. • AA: The ATA evaluators have years of experience of using this method.

  15. References Garant, M. (2009). A case forholisticassessment.AFinLA-e Soveltavankielitieteentutkimuksia2009, 1, 5-17. Waddington, C. (2001b). Shouldtranslationsbeassessedholisticallyorthrough error analysis? Hermes, Journal of Linguistics, 26, 15-38. Williams, M. (2009). TranslationQualityAssurance. Mutatis Mutandis, Vol 2, No 1., 3-23

  16. Thankyou! Carmen Valero-Garcés carmen.valero@uah.es Francisco Vigier francisco.vigier@uah.es Mary Phelan mary.phelan@dcu.ie

More Related