Selecting a translation revision procedure: do common sense and statistics agree?

摘要

Translators employ a wide variety of revision procedures in their day-to-day working practice. This paper empirically investigates the impact of these revision procedures on both the revision product and the revision process. Sixteen professional revisers revised four comparable translations, each time using a different procedure: (1) monolingual, (2) bilingual, (3) bilingual followed by monolingual, and (4) monolingual followed by bilingual. To analyse the data, a product-based revision analysis was combined with process-based analyses, i.e. using keystroke logs and think aloud protocols. Although common sense and research-based results seem to coincide at first sight with respect to the selection of a suitable revision procedure, some results deviated from the expected outcomes. To conclude, the paper formulates some practical advice on selecting revision procedures, taking quality and time into account.