Quality in Specialised Translation
This chapter focuses on revision, the third and final phase of the translation process to assess and/or improve the suitability for purpose of the final product. It first examines the industry-wide international standards on quality in professional transl
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The concept of “quality” is central in translation but as difficult to define as it is in interpreting, where “a good interpretation […] has often been referred to as the Loch Ness monster: it is very difficult to spot, but once seen, it is immediately recognisable” (Iglesias Fernández 2010). Yet every day translations are evaluated, and not only formally by examiners grading students or by evaluators in public calls for translators by international organisations and government bodies. Much more frequently, translation quality is evaluated informally and intuitively, but not for this less crucially, by the clients who actually pay for a translation service and, ultimately, the end-users of the translation. Each of the main participants in the translation process—the author of the ST, the translator, the commissioner and the target users—has a specific perception of the quality of the translation product, which can be in conflict with the viewpoint of the other participants, each view deriving from the specific needs and different motivations concerning the same translation (Gile 2009: 37–46). Both the ST author and the client (i.e. the commissioner) nearly always do not have the necessary competences (linguistic, cultural and translational) to evaluate the translation’s quality, and, in any case, a commissioner may be more interested in how quickly the final product is © The Author(s) 2020 F. Scarpa, Research and Professional Practice in Specialised Translation, Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51967-2_4
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delivered than its quality. The end-recipients of the TT can assess how well the translation works (that is its functionality) but not always its accuracy against the ST—which usually they do not have access to—and are often interested only in some specific portions of the translation and not the whole TT. As for the translator, she has the necessary competences to evaluate the quality of her work but usually is less competent in the specialised domain of the translation and its terminology rather than the ST author and the TT end-user. This variety of motivations and needs that can influence the evaluation of the quality of a translation makes quality a relative notion, which is always negotiated among translator, commissioner and end-users. Even ‘universal’ parameters of quality such as accuracy and readability, rooted as they are in Chesterman’s (2016: 170–184) four fundamental ‘ethical values’ (clarity, truth, trust and understanding), are in fact relative, as they should always be contextualised within the different situations where the translation evaluation is actually carried out. The quality of translation as a communication service is then a relative concept as there are different ‘fit for purpose’ quality levels. In the first part of this chapter, after reviewing industry-wide international standards on quality in professional translation (Sect. 4.1) and their emphasis on revision in order to produce a high-quality translation, th
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