On Enhancing Translators' Competence Through Translation Auditing

Although it has been many times proven that translators with experience in the field produce higher-quality translation, it is still a challenging task to define what an experienced translator is and what helps to enhance translators' competence. The research has been an outcome of an ongoing collaboration between a higher education institution training translators and a translation agency. The study follows a longitudinal quantitative and qualitative research design where quality of texts translated by the same sample of the population, i.e., the same translators, is studied twice over the period of 1.5 years in order to demonstrate whether there is improvement. For the research purposes, the major attention is placed on the nature and frequency of errors produced by the same translators in similar types of texts. The research aims at determining whether the translation quality of translators improved. The particular research questions are as follows: Do translators make the same types of errors, if any? What types of errors are most prevalent and difficult to eradicate? Analysis of translated texts is performed with the focus on language errors (grammar, syntax, style, punctuation, etc.) and mistranslations.