The Hunting for the Quality: A New Methodology for Evaluating the Quality of Translation

The obsession of the translation scholars has been so far to strive for the objectivity, i.e. focusing on assessing the hard,tangible aspects of quality and discarding the subjectivity inherent in the soft aspects of judging the quality oftranslation by regarding it as unscientific. In order to make sure that the comment made on the quality of a translated text is both objective and comprehensive, the translator should attempt to complement the criteria that are already known and quantitative with the ones that are vague and subjective. Whereas the criteria that are known quantitatively can be measured, the qualitative criteria are non-explicit and vague, therefore, cannot be measured in the numerical term. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how, by applying the fuzzy logic methodology, it is possible to render the qualitative, vague linguistic descriptions into quantitative, measurable criteria. In addition, this paper explores the possibility of using fuzzy set membership, the basis of fuzzy logic, in developing a fully automatic translation quality measurement tools.

Keywords:

Fuzzy logic methodology , Objectivity , Quality , Subjectivity