Book reviewPerspectives on Translation Quality (Text, Translation, Computational Processing 9). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. 273 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-025984-1 €99.95
Table of contents
The aim of this edited volume is “to reflect on translation quality from different perspectives” and “to offer insights from a translator training perspective and from an industry perspective” (1). It also seeks to build bridges between theory and practice and is presented as being of interest to the layperson and language specialists alike. The volume is divided into four thematic sections. Part 1 focuses on translation quality in the translation training context (four articles), Part 2 is on the evaluation of machine translation (two articles), Part 3 turns attention to quality assessment in the translation workflow (three articles) and the final part looks at domain-specific quality issues in legal and literary translation (two articles). A perspective shared by all contributors is that translation evaluation in the 21st century should be adapted to the communicative context of use. This is not exactly a paradigm-changing perspective, but it sets the tone for the book. It is claimed that the book “puts forward new hypotheses that will certainly prove useful to trainers and language professionals” (4). While the volume delivers on its promise to offer perspectives on translation quality from training and professional viewpoints, the promise to put forward new hypotheses is not fulfilled and it is difficult to see how it builds bridges between theory and practice when the majority of contributions are predominantly a-theoretical.