Review: Improving Translation Quality
A colleague at my office recently lent me her copy of Kevin Morrissey’s Improving Translation Quality (the Japanese title is ?????????????—??????????), a very useful guide to measuring and improving the quality of technical translations that was produced with help from Hitachi Technical Communications Inc.
There is, of course, a great deal of technical information produced in Japan that needs to be translated into English for consumption in markets overseas, but there is not always a clear understanding of what constitutes a good translation and what distinguishes it from a merely passable or even an unacceptable one. This book addresses that need by providing a general overview of the issues facing technical translation in a Japanese-to-English context, providing specific examples of common problems in the field, by introducing Hitachi’s Translation Evaluation System (TES), and by offering suggestions on how Japanese source documents can be prepared to facilitate the process of translating them into English.
The book is intended for J-to-E translators, but also for native English editors and translation managers. It also thoughtfully acknowledges the fact that, although organizations like SWET and JAT tend to emphasize that J-to-E translations are best left to native speakers of English, the reality in Japan is that often non-native speakers of the target language are responsible for producing translations in English; and so the book offers recommendations accordingly, including the common arrangement of having a native speaker of English edit the translation prior to publication.
The author emphasizes the importance of having a system for making judgments about the quality of translations, because without such a system of making distinctions based on quality, cost alone tends to become the deciding factor when purchasing translations, which can lead to undesirable results. For this purpose, the author introduces TES, a system that breaks down common errors in J-to-E technical translations into several categories that are represented by various error codes. Incorrect or missing articles (a, an, and the), for example, are TES error code 01, and problems with subject/verb agreement are TES error code 02, and so on for a total of 27 types of errors in nine categories (grammar, spelling, unnatural English, meaning, clarity, poor verb usage, terminology, inconsistency, and conformity with stylistic requirements).
A native speaker of English would use these codes as a rubric for arriving at a quality score based on the number of errors per 1000-word sample, which would then be used to assign a grade to the translation. The author recommends grades ranging from “A” for a very good translation to “D” for an unacceptable one. Under this system, a translation with ten or more errors per 1000 words is deemed to be of insufficient quality and must be fixed. For translations of less than 1000 words, the author also recommends a simplified “Pass/Fix” grading system, in which case only translations with no errors get a passing grade. (This system is somewhat different from the one I have used in my own work, which seeks to evaluate errors by how critical they are, but I have no doubt that this approach is very effective at providing a basis for making comparisons about the quality of the work produced by different translators.)
The book also offers standard technical writing guidelines for the Japanese authors of technical documents, who quite possibly have even more influence over the quality of the final translation than the translator does (after all, even a fantastic translator cannot be expected to produce a good translation from a document that was not very well organized in the original Japanese). This is the part of the book that filled me with a desire to put a copy in the hands of all the “clients” in our office, the people who prepare the original documents for translation. Fortunately, the entire book is written in both English and Japanese—including the recommendation from the chairman of the Japan Technical Communicators Association in the front and the indexes in the back—which makes it easy to share even with people who are not translators themselves.
The translation of technical documents from Japanese to English is certainly a fairly specific niche in the overall translation market, but within that niche, this book addresses many of the important considerations in producing high-quality translations. For this reason alone, this book should be regarded as required reading by anyone getting started in the field or anyone who needs to be able to evaluate the quality of J-to-E technical translations.
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