Quality Perceptions and Professional Status in Translation

Abstract

While there is a large body of knowledge on quality in translation and localisation, the question of how quality is perceived based on extrinsic factors has so far not been widely investigated. This paper is focused on how information on the professional status of translators can change the participants’ perception and what attitudes and opinions they have towards a translation based on extrinsic information. This paper provides an overview of translation quality from the academic and industry perspective and offers a detailed description of the experiment carried out. In it, we could observe that those participants with higher levels of expertise were less influenced by extrinsic information than those with lower levels of expertise. We present our results against the background of existing literature on how translation is regarded as a profession and reflect on the connection between this and how quality is perceived in translation and localisation.