A Corpus-Based Approach to Evaluating Student Translations

Translation evaluation is highly problematic because of its subjective nature. In a translation classroom, efforts must be made to develop an approach to translation evaluation that enables evaluators to provide objective and constructive feedback to their students. This article describes a specially-designed Evaluation Corpus and presents an experiment which demonstrates that such a corpus can be used to significantly reduce the subjective element in translation evaluation and illustrates that this reduced subjectivity will benefit both evaluators and students.