Translation Quality Assessment of TSE Standards Translated from English into Turkish: Examining the Effect of Commission in the Light of the Skopos Theory

This study aimed to evaluate translation quality of the standards translated from English into Turkish before 2016 and after 2016 to determine whether there was an improvement in the translation quality of standards as a result of the introduction of a translation commission [auftrag]. For this purpose, corpus one (C1) consisting of ten randomly chosen standards in the field of construction translated before 2016, and corpus two (C2) consisting of ten randomly chosen standards in the field of construction translated after 2016 were evaluated according to the translation quality assessment model Multidimensional Quality Metrics(MQM) (Lommel, Burchardt,&Uszkoreit, 2014, 2015). The translation errors found in each corpus were classified according to seventeen error types and their severities. Then the results of the translation quality analysis of C1 and C2 were compared to find out whether there was any improvement in the translation quality of C2 after the introduction of the translation commission. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were utilized in the study. The data analysis revealed that the introduction of the translation commission improved the quality of translation: there was a significant decrease in error rates in C2. Moreover, the error patterns in C1 and C2 were found to differ significantly: the translation errors in C1 were distributed uniformly over the error categories, while the majority of the errors in C2 belonged to the category of Fluency. The study finally discussed the findings in relation to the availability of a translation commission in the translation process within the framework of Skopos theory