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Holistic vs Analytical Assessment in Legal Translation

Holistic vs Analytical Assessment in Legal Translation. Carmen Valero-Garcés & Francisco Vigier – University of Alcalá Mary Phelan – Dublin City University. Assessment in Translation Studies and Professional Practice Introduction to HA Research Study on HA in Legal Translation

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Holistic vs Analytical Assessment in Legal Translation

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  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

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