Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present

Translation Quality Assessment has become one of the key issues in translation studies. This comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of translation evaluation makes explicit the grounds of judging the worth of a translation and emphasizes that translation is, at its core, a linguistic art.

Written by the author of the world’s best known model of translation quality assessment, Juliane House provides an overview of relevant contemporary interdisciplinary research on intercultural communication and globalization research, corpus and psycho- and neurolinguistic studies. House also acknowledges the importance of socio-cultural and situational context in which texts are embedded, and which need to be analysed when they are transferred through space and time in acts of translation but also highlights the linguistic art form of translation.

The text includes a newly revised and presented model of translation quality assessment which, like its predecessor, relies on detailed textual and culturally informed contextual analysis and comparison. The test cases also show that there are two steps in translation evaluation: firstly analysis, description and explanation; secondly, judgements of value, socio-cultural relevance and appropriateness. The second is futile without the first: to judge is easy, to understand less so.

Translation Quality Assessment is an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication, as well as for professional translators.

Juliane House is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at University of Hamburg, Germany. She is Director of Programs in Arts and Sciences at Hellenic American University, Athens, Greence and President of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Communication. Her most important books are Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited (1997), Translation (2009), Translational Action and intercultural Communication (2009) and Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2014).