Phraseology as indicator for translation quality assessment of museum texts: A corpus-based analysis

Abstract

Phraseological competence, although traditionally left somewhat in the background in research on translation quality assessment, refers to a high level of knowledge of a language, and is therefore worthy of greater attention. Some studies, which are exceptions to this neglect, suggest that the level of phraseological quality of a text is directly related to its overall quality. This paper assesses these 2 types of quality in 14 original and translated texts from a parallel electronic corpus from museums and art centers in the city of New York, the aim being to test whether there is a correlation between phraseological and overall quality. In absolute terms, the results of the phraseological assessment are usually seen to be better than those from the overall assessment. On comparing the two analyses, and despite generally negative results and a few notable exceptions, there is a tendency toward this correlation.