Babel in Document Design: The Evaluation of Multilingual Texts

Translations are considered by their specific target audiences to be first and foremost autonomous documents. Hence, they should be evaluated in terms of whether or not they achieve their communicative goals. This chapter analyzes the process of document design in a multilingual setting. In order to evaluate translation quality, a theoretical perspective is formulated as a basis for criteria for a good translation. In this perspective, the target text is considered an autonomous document. Two sets of criteria are distinguished: correctness errors and junctional errors. Two tools were used to assess translation quality: expert analysis and reader‐focused evaluation. For both tools, a multilingual evaluation team was formed with the highest possible expertise in the target languages, in linguistics, and in usability. The chapter also describes the process of evaluation and the results.