The speck in your brother's eye – the beam in your own: Quality management in translation and revision

Global and national changes have resulted in new requirements for quality management and quality control in translation. International standards like the recent European Quality Standard for Translation Services, EN 15038 (2006), have been developed in order to give clients an assurance that they are receiving high-quality translation work. According to some of these standards, target texts have to be revised at least twice or, ideally, three times by others than the translator him/herself. Revision and revision processes have also come more into focus in TS research. According to Gile (2005), who has developed a mathematical formula that defines quality as the balanced sum of quality parameters, revision tasks are usually carried out by experienced translators. In two empirical longitudinal studies at CBS, the relation between translation competence and revision competence of students and professional translators was investigated. The question posed was: “are the good translators also the good revisers?” In this article, quality parameters and revision processes are described and shown in models. The question is raised whether it would be an advantage to establish special training in revision, parallel to the translator training.