Translation Quality Assessment

How do we know when a translation is good? This simple question lies at the heart of all concerns with translation criticism. But not only that, in trying to assess the quality of a translation one also addresses the heart of any theory of translation, i.e., the crucial question of the nature of translation or, more specifically, the nature of the relationship between a source text and its translation text. Given that translation is essentially an operation in which the meaning of linguistic units is to be kept equivalent across languages, one can distinguish at least three different views of meaning, each of which leads to different conceptions of translation evaluation.