Back-translation : a strategy for translation quality assessment

Abstract EN

This study is an attempt to use the back-translation strategy to assess translations between Arabic and English.

It is applied on four scientific and technical English texts from Newsweek magazine together with their Arabic translations from the Arabic version of Newsweek magazine.

The Arabic ones were back-translated by three highly qualified translators at the Department of Translation/ College of Arts/ University of Mosul, and the resulting English translations were compared against the original versions.

The reviewer's focal point of analysis is the forward-translations.

It is found that back-translation can be conducted between Arabic and English and the method is workable and useful in assessing the translation of non-literary texts.

Also, the process of decentering, which is done by the forward-translator, is useful and illuminating.

The analysis reveals that there are many instances of one-to-one equivalent between the source texts and the forward-translations.

The back-translators are more competent and knowledgeable than the forward-translators