Possibilities and limitations of optimal reference translations: Exploring 'translationese' in professional translations of newspaper articles

The study explores translation quality by analysing two Czech professional translations of English newspaper articles. The original idea was for a tandem of translators-cum-theoreticians to synthesise the best of the two translations while introducing slight to moderate modifications where necessary, to produce an optimal reference translation, i.e., a translation thought to be the best possible that can be achieved by a team of human translators; optimal reference translations can be used in assessments of excellent machine translations. It soon became apparent, however, that a considerable amount of editing and creativity was needed from the team striving for an optimal reference translation, prompting the present authors to subject the original translations to a detailed assessment. The primary focus is on the formal aspect of the translations and the phenomenon known as 'translationese', which is understood here to refer to a lack of sensitivity to target language usage. The problems identified fall into a wide range of categories such as spelling, morphosyntax, grammar, lexicon and word formation. Special attention is paid to source-language interference; having reviewed existing theoretical discussions of interference, the authors drafted a typology which was then expanded to include several other types of errors recurrent in the translations analysed.