Acceso usuarios
Malcolm Williams
Translation quality assessment (TQA) tools frequently come under attack because of the myriad variables involved in TQA: the definition, number and seriousness of errors, the purpose of the assessment, evaluator competence and reliability, the client's or end user's requirements, deadlines, complexity of the TQA model, etc. In recent years, progress in factoring in these variables and achieving greater reliability and validity has been achieved through functionalist, criterion-referenced models proposed by Colina (2008, 2009) and others for the assessment of professional translation quality, even though they have come under attack from proponents of the normative assessment model (Anckaert et al., 2008, 2009). At the same time, progress has been made in student assessment through the holistic, criterion-referenced approaches developed by education theorists Wiggins (1998) and Biggs and Tang (2007) ─ approaches that have been applied to translation by Kelly (2005). In this article, the author proposes a "holistic-componential" model for translation student assessment. Based on a combination of Colina's functionalist translation assessment model and the holistic student assessment model and drawing on definitions of professional standards applied in North America, it is designed to rectify some of the perceived shortcomings of the conventional quantitative, error-based marking schemes, those of the more "impressionistic" schemes, and even those of criterion-referenced models.
