Quality assessment in multilingual, multimodal, and multiagent translation and interpreting (QAM 3 T&I): Proposing a unifying framework for research
Chao Han · Interpreting and Society · 2025
Quality assessment (QA) plays a crucial role in translation and interpreting (T&I). The rapid digitalisation of communication and the growing demand for accessibility have expanded T&I services across multiple languages (multilingual), through various communication channels encompassing text, visuals, and audio (multimodal), and by different agents including humans, machines, and their hybrid forms (multiagent). This diversity in languages, modes, and agents, along with their combinations, significantly broadens the scope of QA. In this article, I first propose a unifying framework for conceptualising QA research. Then, I apply this framework to systematically analyse 306 research articles on QA, selected from 6,974 articles published in 22 representative sources between 2015 and 2024. The review reveals that: (a) most QA studies focus on language pairs involving English; (b) three assessment scenarios—machine evaluation of machine T&I, human evaluation of machine T&I, and human evaluation of human T&I—dominate, together accounting for 97.1% of all QA practices, and (c) the QA research primarily concerns such assessment facets as objects, agents, and instruments, while other facets remain under-explored. Based on these findings, I outline an agenda for advancing QA research to address overlooked facets and adapt to the evolving complexities of T&I practices.