SOAS Research Online

Abstract

As the demand for translation services surges, issues of translation processes and quality — which have been heatedly discussed in Translation Studies — have also been increasing concerns for professionals in the translation market. In China, these issues are urgent ones, as the Chinese translation market status quo is unstandardized, and the quality of translation is inconsistent. Existing studies and discussions into translation quality assurance within the Chinese translation market are found to be prescriptive, and translation as a product in the professional market has so far been inadequately addressed in Translation Studies. With the aim of narrowing the gap and enhancing the understanding of translation processes and quality in the market, this research conducted six case studies with Chinese translation companies. The focus is on exploring how translation is conducted in the companies, and how company practice assured translation quality. Questionnaires, interviews and textual analysis were adopted as research methods. The research found that in these case studies, there are two different mechanisms for quality assurance: namely, the expert-based mechanism and the procedure-based mechanism. The former relies on translation professionals; the latter depends on the synthetic effect of procedures to assure the quality of translation. The features of these mechanisms have been summarized and analysed, to shed some light on quality assurance in the translation industry. In addition, further concepts discovered through the case studies — about translation as a product, translation quality and quality assurance — are reported in this research, to promote wider and deeper knowledge of translation and translation quality in the professional market.