TRANSMETRICS
A Formative Approach to Translator Competence Assessment and Translation Quality Evaluation for the New Millennium

Translation quality is a central issue in the translation profession and one of the most controversial topics in translation studies today. In one aspect, translation quality is a direct result of the translation process, which cannot be separated from the principal actor in the process, namely the translator. Subsequently, translator competence is always called into question whenever the quality of the translation product is questioned. Yet for the main part, translation researchers and educators have treated the quality of the translation product, the translation process, and the translator competence as discrete entities. In fact it is only recently that the focus has shifted from the translation product to the translation process albeit in a timid and limited fashion and with more obscure views and perspectives on what constitutes process and quality.

Furthermore, while the question of who assesses the assessor has been a thorny issue in the translation profession and one of the major initial obstacles encountered by accreditation and professional bodies, the competence of the translator assessor and the translation quality assurer has not been seriously addressed if at all, and there seems to be a tacit assumption among translation educators that the translator assessor, especially in education, is somehow irreproachable. Furthermore, a nativist predisposition seems to dominate the minds of educators and accreditation bodies, so much so that well-established, respectable universities and educational institutions that have succumbed to the onslaught of accreditation madness, rendering their accreditation-indexed translation certificates and degrees almost meaningless, have begun to place greater emphasis on the "native" speaker. 

On the ground, there is serious loss of control on the part of the translator, who is supposed to be the developer of the translation, who is supposed to be ultimately responsible for the final product and who is the first to blame for any negative feedback, justified or otherwise, that the translation commissioner may receive from again supposedly infallible focus groups or translation quality assurers, whose competence is more often than not questionable, yet not called into question.

Without well-defined assessment and evaluation standards and processes, translator assessment and translation quality assurance will always be haphazard and subject to the personal preferences of the individual assessor or interpretive frameworks, bureaucratic perspectives and draconian measures of educators and evaluators alike.

This paper examines both aspects of translation quality assurance — translator competence and translation product. It provides a model for assessing both elements with some measure of objectivity, based on the notion that translation is not a haphazard activity, but rather a rational, objective-driven, result-focused process that yields a quantifiable product meeting a set of specifications, tacit or expressed, against which the quality of the product can be measured.  

© 1999 Ali Darwish
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