The Consistency Degree in the Use of Translation Procedures: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This article aims to introduce a pilot study which investigated the consistency degree in the use of translation procedures. Through a translation test, it was observed that a high degree of consistency exists in most cases. Further, the kappa coefficient was employed to verify this outcome. The final results revealed that translators tend to adopt the same procedure to tackle the same word. Additionally, translators’ afterthoughts were examined. The results showed that patterns help simplify translation tasks but also cause “rote translation”, which hampers the “colourfulness of words”. Besides, the context length and the mindset at the moment of translating are the two factors which may affect translators’ outputs for the same text at different times. Lastly, the level of difficulty and the consistency degree are negatively correlated. In this pilot study, positive findings were obtained, which means that large-scale examinations can be conducted from the same or a different perspective in the future. Nevertheless, it is suggested that the number of research subjects be large enough for statistical calculation.