Translation is actually the skill which involve students’ active contribution in the assessing process. Meanwhile, e-portfolio regards as one of the method to achieve students’ active contribution in assessing their own translation works since it not only functions to collect the works electronically but can also function to show the sequence of works improvement. The aim of this study is to investigate students’ perception on e-portfolio for assessing their translation skill. It was also intended to discover application preference to apply the e-portfolio method of assessment. The participants of the study are 49 English Department students enrolled in the third year. The data was collected by using questionnaire in the form of closed and open questionnaires. The results indicate that the participants generally prefer to be evaluated by the e-portfolio assessment. Most of them believed that e-portfolio assessment improved their translation quality and enhanced their motivation and the application they chose to apply the e-portfolio is the free application which can be accessed anywhere.

This study focused on the analysis of the translation strategies and resulted translation quality in rendering metaphors found in the Twilight novel. The analysis involved the translation strategies by Newmark (1988) and translation quality by Hartono (2016). The results showed that there were seven translation strategies utilized by the translator in rendering the metaphors in the Twilight novel from Indonesian into English with total metaphors were 164. Those metaphors were translated using translation strategies: reproducing the same metaphorical image in the target language 48 times (29%), replacing the metaphorical image in the source language with a standard metaphorical image in the target language with 25 times (15%), translating metaphor by simile by maintaining the metaphorical image with 20 times (12%), translating metaphor by simile plus sense with 13 times (8%), converting a metaphor to its sense or meaning only with 44 times (29%), deleting metaphor with 7 times (4%), and translating metaphor by the same metaphor with the sense or meaning added with 7 times (4%). In terms of content quality, the translation of metaphors was dominated by good content, presentation, and mechanics quality. Moreover, the application of each translation strategy would result in different types of translation quality in terms of content, presentation and mechanics. In addition, it is suggested that the employment of translation strategy in rendering metaphor should consider deeply the existence of the same metaphor both in the source language and target language because the quality of the translation will be determined by the translation strategies.  

Abstract As a new field of translation with its own special genre, geotourism has not yet been firmly established because geotourism translations are currently not of a sufficient professional standard. This situation does not provide geotourists with the genre’s full target of enjoyment, learning and engagement through science popularisation tourism activities. In order to better meet these three definitive purposes in geotourism, this study analyses the three basic categories of geotourism—geological features (GFs), geological processes (GPs) and cultural elements (CEs)—to determine effective strategies of geotourism translation from Chinese into English. Challenges in translation include scientific jargon, language style and cultural gaps. In this article, the advantages of Hu’s Eco-translatology theory are explained and used for minimising translation problems; and the corpus linguistics method, superior for quantitative and qualitative analysis, is utilised. As well, digital auxiliary tools Tmxmall (2014) and Sketch Engine (2003) were employed to facilitate corpus research. Through analysis, effective strategies in each of the key geotourism categories, GFs, GPs and CEs, were identified, shaped and recommended for future translators’ attention. In the results, literal translation, transliteration and free translation, addition and use of official UNESCO names were recommended to render GFs. Division and shift translation, literal translation and shift and division were recommended for GPs. Literal translation, transliteration and free translation and addition were recommended for CEs. Since this is an initial investigation in the genre of geotourism, this study has attempted to build a model platform for future study and wider research in geotourism translation and translation pedagogy for the improvement of geotourism translation quality.

BACKGROUND Self Determination Theory (SDT) conceptualizes human motivation in terms of a spectrum. However, literature is scarce on how to measure self-determination in different languages or how self-determination can influence the effectiveness of healthcare interventions. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to translate and culturally adapt a psychometric questionnaire on self-determination (TSRQ) as well as SMS booster messages for a Brief Negotiational Intervention (BNI) aimed at reducing harmful alcohol use among injury patients presenting at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) in Moshi, Tanzania. METHODS A mixed-methods approach was used to evaluate the psychometric properties of the TSRQ and SMS booster messages. Likert-scale surveys were administered to expert panels to assess translation quality and adherence to theory. RESULTS Quantitative analyses confirmed that the Swahili translation of the TSRQ accurately reflected SDT constructs. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed a two-domain model had a better fit than the original three-domain TSRQ. Expert panel surveys indicated that the SMS booster messages maintained strong connections to tenets of SDT. CONCLUSIONS This was the first study to conduct a cross-cultural validation of the TSRQ in Tanzania and Tanzanian Swahili and the first to implement and assess motivational constructs in SMS booster messages for a BNI to promote safe alcohol use. The TSRQ is a valid, clinically useful scale, but could be improved with more items. SMS booster messages touch on many SDT constructs, affirming their motivational utility.

This paper has adopted a quantitative approach to carry out a linguistic study, within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. Translation is a process where source language and target language interact with each other. The present study aims at exploring the feasibility of mean dependency distance as a metric for automated translation quality assessment. The current research hypothesized that different levels of translation are significantly different in the aspect of mean dependency distance. Data of this study were based on the written translation in Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners which was composed of translations from Chinese EFL learners in various topic. The translations were human-scored to determine the levels of translation, according to which the translations were categorized. Our results indicated that: (1) senior students perform better in translation than junior students, and mean dependency distance of translations from senior group is significantly shorter than the junior; (2) high quality translations yield shorter mean dependency distance than the low quality translations; (3) mean dependency distance of translations is moderately correlated with the human score. The resultant implication suggests the potential for mean dependency distance in differentiating translations of different quality.

It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions. Thai-Lao is a typical low-resource language pair of tiny parallel corpus, leading to suboptimal NMT performance on it. However, Thai and Lao have considerable similarities in linguistic morphology and have bilingual lexicon which is relatively easy to obtain. To use this feature, we first build a bilingual similarity lexicon composed of pairs of similar words. Then we propose a novel NMT architecture to leverage the similarity between Thai and Lao. Specifically, besides the prevailing sentence encoder, we introduce an extra similarity lexicon encoder into the conventional encoder-decoder architecture, by which the semantic information carried by the similarity lexicon can be represented. We further provide a simple mechanism in the decoder to balance the information representations delivered from the input sentence and the similarity lexicon. Our approach can fully exploit linguistic similarity carried by the similarity lexicon to improve translation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art Transformer baseline system and previous similar works.

Automatic post-editing (APE) is the study of correcting translation errors in the output of an unknown machine translation (MT) system and has been considered as a method of improving translation quality without any modification to conventional MT systems. Recently, several variants of Transformer that take both the MT output and its corresponding source sentence as inputs have been proposed for APE; and models introducing an additional attention layer into the encoder to jointly encode the MT output with its source sentence recorded a high-rank in the WMT19 APE shared task. We examine the effectiveness of such joint-encoding strategy in a controlled environment and compare four types of decoder multi-source attention strategies that have been introduced into previous APE models. The experimental results indicate that the joint-encoding strategy is effective and that taking the final encoded representation of the source sentence is the more proper strategy than taking such representation within the same encoder stack. Furthermore, among the multi-source attention strategies combined with the joint-encoding, the strategy that applies attention to the concatenated input representation and the strategy that adds up the individual attention to each input improve the quality of APE results over the strategy using the joint-encoding only.

In this research, two Persian translations of Coelho’s ALCHEMIST were studied in the light of Julian House’s (2015) theoretical TQA model and Venuti's (1995) theory of domestication and foreignization.  The focus was on comparing differences between the original text and the translated texts, namely, between the English text of ALCHEMIST and its two Persian translations by Hejazi and Jafari, in terms of covert errors and overt errors. To this end, one hundred examples, in the forms of phrases or sentences were examined and compared with their equivalent translations. The inductive method and comparative strategy were employed as the methodology to examine the hypothesis of this research. The results revealed that two Persian translations of ALCHEMIST had a roughly close percentage of errors. Namely, Hejazi's translation comprised 66.35 percent covert and domesticated, and Jafari incorporated52.82 percent. Also, the overt errors in Hejazi’s translation comprised 14.72 percent overt and foreignized and Jafari incorporated 32.5 percent. One of the errors observed in both translations was incorrect translation. As a result, Hejazi's translation is reported of better quality than Jafari's translation.

The research addresses how Sundanese terms of address are translated into English. It discusses specifically the translation techniques practiced by the translator which affect the quality of the translation. The data are taken from Sundanese short stories and their translation in English. The theories exercised to find out the applied techniques are based on Molina and Albir (2002). The translation quality is examined using translation quality assessment of Nababan et al (2012). The analyses are carried out using Santosa’s methods (2017), a modification of Spreadly’s, following the analysis steps of domain, taxonomy, componential and culture findings. The results show that there are five translation techniques practiced by the translator, namely established equivalent, pure borrowings, deletion, variation, and implicit. The translation quality appears to gain 2.7. This score means that the translation is quite good. While the translation accuracy takes the highest score of 2.9, followed by acceptability 2.8, and readability having 2.5.

For decades, the fuzzy notion of translation quality has evolved parallel to the theorizations of translation and localization. This paper focuses on a novel approach to quality evaluation in the localization industry: how Facebook crowdsourced quality evaluation to an active community of users that votes on proposed translations. This approach, unthinkable a decade ago, seems to combine and distill some of the best aspects of several previous Translation Studies evaluation proposals, such as user-based approaches (Nida, 1964), functionalist approaches (Nord, 1997; Reiss and Vermeer, 1984) or corpus-assisted approaches (Bowker, 2001). These models were largely criticized at the time because they did not explicitly indicate how they could be professionally implemented. The current paper critically reviews the emerging crowdsourcing model in light of these approaches to quality evaluation and describes how mechanisms suggested in these earlier theoretical proposals are actually implemented in the Facebook model.