EXPERIMENTS IN LANGUAGE TRANSLATION: TECHNICAL ENGLISH-TO-VIETNAMESE
H. Wallace Sinaiko, Richard W. Brislin · 1970
Abstract : The paper documents the results of a series of experiments on translating technical material from English to Vietnamese. The paper addresses the questions of translation speed, number of errors, and quality assessment. Three different methods for measuring the quality of translations are examined; back-translation, knowledge testing, and performance testing. Translation costs and means of writing translatable English are also reviewed. It is concluded that: 400 words per hour is a reasonable speed expectation for technical material; quality of translation significantly affects performance and quality may be sampled by any of the means tested; costs can be reduced by several methods but $70 per thousand words is a reasonable estimate.