Checking Translations for Communicative Adequacy

At the 2015 conference, I did a presentation based on checking of Aheri Gondi (Dravidian, central India) to demonstrate how so many issues can be missed if the consultant reviews the BT alone. In this paper, I share my experience of checking some psalms in Halbi, an Indo-Aryan language of central India. A consultant who specializes in Old Testament and was trained in Hebrew poetry did the review remotely while my responsibility was merely to follow up her notes in a face-to-face check with a UNS. I discovered that my attention to the linguistic features of the draft and issues of naturalness and discourse led me to do a lot more work than I had expected. Though I do not know Halbi, I am reasonably proficient in Hindi which is closely related. Of the 231 suggestions in 16 psalms that actually resulted in changes to the draft, 51 (22% of total) were related to naturalness and discourse, of which 42 were generated by my review. 19 other issues (8%) were picked up only because I looked at the actual draft. These findings strengthen the case for requiring consultants to pay closer attention to receptor language features. We need to also reckon with the fact that project teams have varying competencies in writing back-translations. My experience with this check also demonstrates that the consultant does not need to know the receptor language to be able to review the draft translation.