Possibilities and limitations of optimal reference translations: Exploring 'translationese' in professional translations of newspaper articles
Abstract
The study explores translation quality by analysing two different Czech translations of English newspaper articles, done by professionals hired by a translation company. The original idea was for a tandem of translators-cum-theoreticians to synthesise the best of the two existing translations, while introducing slight to moderate modifications where necessary, to arrive at an optimal reference translation, i.e. a translation thought to be the best possible that can be achieved by a team of human translators; optimal reference translations can then be used in assessments of excellent machine translations.
It soon became apparent, however, that a considerable amount of editing and creativity was needed from the team striving for an optimal reference translation, prompting the present authors to subject the original translations to a detailed quality assessment. The primary focus is on the formal aspect of the existing translations and the phenomenon known as translationese, which is understood here - in line with Translation Studies authorities (Newmark, Baker) - to refer to a lack of sensitivity to target language usage.
The problems identified fall into a wide range of linguistic categories such as spelling, morphosyntax, grammar, lexicon and word formation. Special attention is paid to the presence of source-language interference; having reviewed existing theoretical discussions of interference, the authors drafted a typology which was then expanded to include several other types of errors recurrent in the translations analysed.