Going the Extra Mile: How Can Translation Consultants Improve Linguistic Quality?

In the 21st century, the rise in mother-tongue speaker driven projects has led to the downplaying of the importance of linguistics. This is so despite several articles written to debunk this myth, with experience revealing that many translators are strongly influenced by a high prestige source text while drafting.

Courses have been developed to train translators in linguistic principles, but in S Asia at least, there has been a proliferation of organizations doing translation, and not all of them value such training. From my own experience, I contend that a more realistic solution is to have translation consultants pick up the slack by looking for language related issues in the draft. My research involved examination of drafts of 100-verse NT passages in eight south Asian language projects covering different language families. Of the 81 CONNOT subcategories, I restricted my review to 25 that deal specially with linguistic issues. The results show that the reviewing consultants detected only 3% - 19% of the issues that I found. I show how SIL transliterators and the Paratext interlinearizer can be used by consultants to examine the actual draft (as back-translations are notoriously unreliable) even if they have no knowledge of the language. I also discovered that many potential errors are influenced by the forms of the classical regional language versions used as model texts; some of these are unique to SOV languages. The issues discovered affect quality in two ways: naturalness and pragmatic accuracy; looking for them is worth the extra time and effort on the part of the consultants, who can be easily trained for this enhanced review process.