Translation Quality Assessment Based On Multidimensional Quality Metrics

With the increasing international academic exchanges,providing English translation versions of Chinese universities’ About Us texts for international readers has become more significant.However,the quality of those translations is far from satisfactory.This study explored the translation quality of those texts by comparing them with the About Us texts on the websites of the American universities’ and by using the assessment model proposed.Twenty Chinese key universities’ bilingual About Us texts were collected,and 20 American top universities’ About Us texts were used as parallel texts to build a Translation Quality Assessment(TQA)model based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics(MQM)system.To verify the practicality and validity of the model,three raters chosen from English majors were invited to evaluate three sample translations with the assessment model and record their evaluation results.Results showed various translation errors could be found in Chinese universities’ About Us texts in English: mistranslation,improper information omission,information gaps between the source texts(ST)and target texts(TT);no annotations were added for the translations of cultural loaded terms;Chinglish,sentences length,formats,and localization issues.Based on the results and discussions,the author attempted to propose the strategies for the translation of About Us texts from Chinese into English: First,pre-edit Chinese About Us texts by taking into consideration of the target audience,i.e.international visitors of the websites and retaining the essential information of the texts;Second,rewrite the English versions to make them more native to English speakers.