Quality perceptions and professional status: The impact of extrinsic information on translation editing

While there is a large body of knowledge on quality in translation and localisation, the question of how quality is perceived based on extrinsic factors has so far not been widely investigated. This paper provides some views on translation quality from different theoretical perspectives in the field of Translation Studies and focuses on how extrinsic information on the translators’ professional status influences the edits introduced by reviewers to translations in proofreading. This paper reports primarily on the second part of a two-stage study. In the first stage we found that participants were influenced by extrinsic information when asked to select their preferred translation. This correlation was stronger in participants with less expertise. In the second stage of the study, presented in this paper, we additionally asked participants to proofread and edit the translations they had selected. We then categorised the changes made (grammar, spelling, meaning, etc.) and conducted frequency analysis and cross-tabulation. Factors for cross tabulations included for example the participants’ level of expertise, and the extrinsic information on the translator’s professional status