Translation Quality Assessment of TSE Standards in the Field of Construction Translated from English into Turkish: Examining the Effect of Commission in the Light of Skopos Theory

Abstract

In the rapidly globalized world, the need for mass production has increased the necessity for standards and their translations. National standardization body of Turkey, Turkish Standards Institution (TSE), went through a radical change in translation policy in the year of 2016, which resulted in the introduction of a new standard developing and translation guide, which is a commission in terms of Skopos theory. The present study aims to evaluate the quality of standards translated from English into Turkish after and before the year of 2016 to determine where there has been an improvement in the translation quality of standards as a result of the innovation. For this purpose, corpus one (C1) consisting of 10 randomly chosen construction standards translated before the year of 2016 and corpus two (C2) consisting of 10 randomly chosen construction standards translated after the year of 2016 were evaluated according to Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) translation quality assessment model (Lommel, Burchardt & Uszkoreit, 2015). Translation errors found in each corpus were classified according to seventeen error types of this model and weighting according to their severities. The results of translation quality analysis of C1 and C2 were compared to find out whether there was any improvement in translation quality of C2 after the introduction of the commission in the year of 2016. The quantitative data analysis revealed that there were 544 instance of translation error observed in C1, while in C2, the number of error decreased to 314. Statistical analysis revealed that the introduction of the commission has significantly improved translation quality. The qualitative analysis revealed that the error patterns differed between the two corpora: in C1 translation errors statistically distributed uniformly over categories while in C2 the majority of the errors were left in the category of Fluency, which could be attributed to the peculiarities of the guideline of 2016. As a result, the present study provides a piece of evidence that the presence of commission is likely to enhance the quality of translation and supports the view of Vermeer that a translator should be provided with a properly defined commission before starting the process of translation.