Malcolm Williams. Translation Quality Assessment: An Argumentation-Centred Approach. Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 2004, 188 p.

This is a book about assessing the quality of non-literary translations produced in a workplace rather than an educational setting. Its basic contention is that Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) systems currently in use are microtextual rather than macrotextual: they look for errors at the sub-sentence level; they “are not designed to assess each passage as an integral part of a whole … or evaluate the logic and coherence existing within the sample passage” (p. xvii). The book begins with a statement of issues. Williams notes that there is no agreement about criteria: how important are typos? elegant style? minor shifts in meaning? He announces the issues he will focus on: Is it alright to use samples rather than assess an entire text? What is a major as opposed to a minor error? If a system involves counting errors, what about the problem that a text with x errors will be satisfactory but a text with x+1 errors unsatisfactory? Finally, if you are rating many different factors, how do you derive an overall assessment: will each of the major errors and each of the minor errors have the same weight? Chapter 1 reviews existing TQA systems used in either a professional or educational context. Williams first considers quantitative systems, those that count errors and output a rating which is interpreted in terms such as ‘deliverable to client’ vs ‘worth revising’ vs ‘unusable’. He considers the SICAL system formerly used by the Canadian federal government’s Translation Bureau, the Ontario Government’s system, and the system used by the Canadian Translators and Interpreters Council to mark certification examinations. He then looks at non-quantitative models of TQA proposed by Reiss, Nord and House. He notes that many systems (though not those actually in use in a professional context in Canada) refer to discourse-level errors. In particular a student-evaluation system proposed by Bensoussan & Rosenhouse recognizes that the message can get through despite micro-level errors; and a system suggested by Larose sees the seriousness of an error in terms of the level of macrostructure affected by it. For some reason there is a rather lengthy discussion of Toury’s concept of norm and its elaboration by Nord and Chesterman. Norm in this sense is the target culture’s concept of what a good translation is; Toury derives it by observing how people do actually translate; it is not given prescriptively ahead of time. This, as Williams himself notes, is a concept from descriptive-explanatory Translation Studies rather than applied TS (under which TQA falls). Chapter 2 presents Argumentation Theory. Argumentation is used in a broad sense that covers any sort of text (narrative, dialogue, description as well as argument proper). Williams proposes to use a system taken from Stephen Toulmin which picks out a text’s argument schema in terms of six elements: the Claim, Grounds, Warrant, Backing, Qualifiers and Rebuttals (CGWBQR) that constitute the message of a text. In a text of any length, there may be several CGWBQR sequences embedded in larger sequences, e.g. the Grounds could have its own internal CGWBQR structure. Williams gives a short (8-line) French text and proposed English translation, analyses the CGWBQR of the French, and finds that the translator has misconstrued C and W. Chapter 3 discusses the relationships among the parts of an argument. Parts of varying size are linked by relations such as problem-solution, conclusion-reason, opinion-evidence, question-answer. The progression of the argument is signposted by various devices such as connector words. Williams rightly emphasizes the enormous importance of connectors, which are typically overlooked in micro-level assessment systems. He gives a French passage along with a translation in which some connectors …