Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of translation technology, which has achieved tremendous success in both academia and industry. Due to these rapid advances, it is clear that technology has already profoundly affected the way translation is produced. More recently, translation technology – ranging from translation-specific technologies such as MT to more general-purpose speech technologies and cloud computing – calls into question some of the assumptions about how, by whom, and to what level of quality translation should be done. Commercially viable translation today is almost entirely the computer-aided variety, given the ubiquitous use of computers in text production practices (O’Hagan, 2020).
Due to its complex nature, providing a comprehensive framework for translation quality assessment (TQA) has always been a challenging task. To address this gap, many scholars spared no effort to provide a framework, approach or theory from philosophical, linguistic, and cultural perspectives, like those by Williams (2004), House (2015) and Reiss and Vermeer (1984), to mention but a few. According to Drugan (2013: 35), “theorists and professionals overwhelmingly agree that there is no single objective way to measure quality”. In the same vein, Dong and Lan note that “translation evaluation [. . .] remains one of the most problematic areas of translation studies as a field of study” (2010: 48). Notwithstanding, there is no consensus among scholars in this regard. Yet it remains one of the most interesting but controversial research areas in Translation Studies. Bittner’s book presents the historical trajectory of this concept by critically reviewing the eclectic and up-to-date viewpoints of Translation Studies scholars, investigating the pros and cons and applications of each. The book under review consists of seven chapters, each of which investigates a specific topic relating to translation quality assessment.
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