Assessor-Centered Translation Quality Assessment: A Theoretical Model and a Case Study

The existing theories and models for translation quality assessment primarily focus on one specific concept of quality, enforcing a certain inflexible pattern of excellence to all translations they investigate, and often leave no space for hermeneutic interpretation and active decision making about the quality of translation for assessors. The current thesis is primarily an attempt to devise an alternative translation quality assessment model: a flexible assessor-centered model that, instead of promoting a particular concept of excellence or insisting on forcing certain pre-established decisions on assessors, serves as a methodological tool that facilitates the process of assessment and gives assessors full authority to make free decisions about the quality of translations. This model is tested in practice in a real world situation in order to make sure of its optimum functionality. To this end, the theoretical model of assessment in this thesis is followed by a case study in which attempts are made to apply the model in practice to a real world local situation. The case study in this thesis investigates different aspects of the evaluative behavior of two groups of assessors during different stages of the process of assessment within the specific socio-cultural context of Iran.