Towards a corpus-based, statistical approach to translation quality: Measuring and visualizing linguistic deviance in student translations

Abstract

In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, more particularly translation acceptability, by comparing the features of translated and original texts. We discuss initial findings that aim to support and objectify formative quality assessment. To that end, we extract a multitude of linguistic and textual features from both student and professional translation corpora that consist of many different translations by several translators in two different genres (fiction, news) and in two translation directions (English to French and French to Dutch). The numerical information gathered from these corpora is exploratively analysed with Principal Component Analysis, which enables us to identify stable, language-independent linguistic and textual indicators of student translations compared to translations produced by professionals. The differences between these types of translation are subsequently tested by means of ANOVA. The results clearly indicate that the proposed methodology is indeed capable of distinguishing between student and professional translations. It is claimed that this deviant behaviour indicates an overall lower translation quality in student translations: student translations tend to score lower at the acceptability level, that is, they deviate significantly from target-language norms and conventions. In addition, the proposed methodology is capable of assessing the acceptability of an individual student’s translation – a smaller linguistic distance between a given student translation and the norm set by the professional translations correlates with higher quality. The methodology is also able to provide objective and concrete feedback about the divergent linguistic dimensions in their text.