Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi,
I'm CHACHVANG, a new member of our forum. I'm a teacher of translation at a university in Vietnam.
I write to ask for your comments on the checklists of evaluation in term of translation teaching as follows:

1. In the viewpoint of translation students, through what aspects will you evaluate a text in the source language (SL)? (I ask you this question because I want to develop a checklist for my students to evaluate the text quality in the SL before translation.)

2. In the viewpoint of a translation teacher, through what aspects will you evaluate your students' translation works in the target language (TL)? (I ask you this question because I want to develop a checklist for me to mark my students' translation papers.)

Could you make any comments?
I look forward to your replies.
Thanks.

CHACHVANG

I am a translator (Spanish to English) and I have also taught ESL. I find that most of my ESL students are not careful and thoughtful enough to do translations, and that research is the key to what translation students lack. Students should research terminology, vocabulary, idioms and sentence structures before they translate. When evaluating the results, intelligibility and accuracy are the most important features. Everything else is cosmetic, and depending on the target audience and proposed functions of the translation, style is more or less important, but certainly secondary to accuracy and intelligibility. Is this helpful?

Another thing you might want to talk about is dialects and slang if you're going to be translating literature instead of standard texts. Is there an equivelent to the class/ race distinctions in the target language you want to use to help convey what the writer is saying? How would you get the readers of the target language to understand what is being said?

I think you can make a judgement of the SL text based on its word use. Specifically speaking , if the text has too many difficult words for the students to comprehend, such as some classic litterary works, it is not a suitable SL for translation. Another way of evaluating is wheter the SL text has what you want your students to practice their translation skills. For example, if long and complex sentences translation is what your aim for them to practice, then the SL text should contain enough of that.

As the TL text, I think you should set a standard based on some translation theories in the first place, then make judgement on your students' work according to how they achieve what the theories entail. For instance, Nida's dynamic equivalence theory is the standard, then you should focus on how your students achieve dynamic equivalence in their translations.