ASSESSMENT OF PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC TRANSLATION QUALITY: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES
The article is an attempt to analyse the situation connected with assessment of translation quality. The author insists on the multipronged approach in assessment of professional and academic translation. It is proved that the professional and academic translations in fact are the different phenomena. Nevertheless, the known mistake typologies do not reflect such a differentiation. Within linguistic translation theory the analysis of source and target texts is carried out by means of such category as equivalence which by its nature is a standard assessment category, representing a basic concept of the text-centred approach to translation. The author argues that assessment of translation quality should not be based merely on the linguistic aspects despite the fact that in traditional linguistic approach to translation language component comes to the first place. Adequate assessment assumes accounting of such parameters of a communicative situation within which the translation is made. They are: the author of the initial message, target audience, customer of translation, subject activity of participants of the communicative act performed via translation. It is a complete idea of the situation determining the translation that allows objective assessment of a ready-made product. The analysis of the material convinces the author that classification approach to definition of a mistake within a concrete communicative situation permits to determine a "weight" of each mistake and to reveal a degree of both an equivalence and adequacy of the translation. Referring to the communicative-functional approach to the translation, the author differentiates such concepts as equivalence and adequacy that represent the essence for discussion of the subject matter stated.