What determines translation quality?
A translation should be faithful, transparent, and free of mechanical errors. A faithful translation accurately conveys the meaning of the source text without distortion. To produce a faithful translation, the translator must have a firm grasp of the source language, including its subtleties and nuances. A transparent translation is one that reads naturally in the target language. In other words, it doesn’t make the reader work any harder to understand it than would a text originally authored in his native language. To produce a transparent translation, the translator must have the writing ability of a skilled author in the target language. Mechanical errors are problems such as misspellings and wrong punctuation. A good translation will respect the spelling and punctuation conventions of the target language, which are often different from those of the source language.
In language translation, some of the most important factors which denote the quality of the translations include: accuracy, how faithful to the source text the translation is, tone, register, punctuation, spelling, layout, format. It is a tough job and required years of training. Many language students believe themselves to be proficient in their own language (into which they must translate), but discover in their training as a translator that they are not as good as they think.
