Testing Quality: Rationale, Goals, and Methods of Community Testing
This presentation is about the rationale, goals, and methods of an adequate community testing program.
Any discussion about quality must consider how quality is defined and evaluated, so a translation team must clearly identify what is appropriate quality and thoroughly test if it has been achieved. Any discussion about quality should also recognize that quality is a moving target. What a team thinks a good translation should look like often evolves over years. Appropriate testing often leads to revision of the project goals and growth in the translators’ skills. So quality is a flexible and evolving concept, wedded to the process and personnel, and foundational to the goals and rationale of community testing.
Besides the rationale and goals of doing community testing, this presentation will also focus on different testing methods, their diverse functions, and why it’s important to systematically cover different types of meaning and community reactions:
In some projects, testing primarily focuses on the propositional content expressed explicitly in a translation, but an adequate testing program should address more.
What has been called “inference testing” focuses on what the intended audience reads between the lines. Inference testing is also a way to “test for surprises”, i.e., problems not anticipated—every team needs a way to test for things they never imagined could be a problem.
A third type of testing—“attitude testing”—focuses on the emotional reactions and evaluations that a text evokes and the attitudes the audience will tend to form about the product.
All three areas of meaning and reactions should be the object of a systematic testing program.