Search

In this article, we explore the collective identity of feminist activists as expressed on Twitter in the context of "Day Without A Woman." We conceptualize collective feminist identity by drawing upon literature on identity, feminism, and social movements. We expected to find a politically-defined group boundary around supporters of "Day Without A Woman." Using the online tool Netlytic, we collected tweets posted from accounts in Washington D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. In a preliminary step, we performed a word count analysis and coded frequent words within the collected tweets into categories of meaning. Based on these categories, we drew a sub-sample of tweets, which we scrutinized in-depth using discourse analysis. Through this qualitative analysis, we show that the group boundary of the supporters of "Day Without A Woman" is defined by the common denominator of their negative relation to Donald TRUMP. While the supporters stress the relevance of feminist claims, barriers to identifying as a feminist seem to persist, as reflected in those whom we call "flexi-feminists." The boundary between supporters and non-supporters of "Day Without A Woman" hence seems to broaden from a line to a space which can be occupied without complete group entry. In this space and beyond, supporters express feminist identity through an "us" versus "him" logic.

This article is the first in a three-part series on translation quality. The articles build on one another by addressing definitions of translation, quality, and finally translation quality. Concerning the meaning of translation, many definitions have been proposed in the translation-studies literature. This article, however, is not a literature review. Instead, it describes a "landscape" within which various definitions of translation can be "planted.” This landscape is delimited by two axes—namely, scope and specifications—and provides a framework for discussing such questions as (a) the relationship between translation and localization and (b) the role of translation specifications. Within that landscape, this article presents two opposing views about the definition of translation. The authors disagree about which of these views is most useful, but they agree that stakeholders must clearly define translation before they can meaningfully address translation quality.

One way to answer the question “What is translation quality?” is to start with a framework put forward by Garvin (1984). That framework describes five approaches to determining quality: Transcendent, Product-Based, User-Based, Production-Based ("manufacturing" being Garvin’s term) and Value-Based. Garvin does not claim that any one of these approaches is sufficient unto itself. Rather, a well-rounded view of quality requires all five. The present article briefly describes these five approaches to quality and references the work of several of the most visible and respected people in the discipline of quality management. Following that presentation, the article discusses arguments for and against applying quality-management approaches to the translation industry. The authors of this article disagree about the relevance of quality management to the translation industry, but they do agree that stakeholders should take a position on the issue.

In recent years translation quality evaluation has emerged as a major, and at times contentious, topic. Despite a focus on systematizing the evaluation of translation quality, the industry landscape is still highly fragmented, in part because different kinds of translation projects require very different evaluations of quality. In addition, human and machine translation (MT) quality evaluation methods have been fundamentally different in kind, preventing comparison of MT with human translation. The lack of clarity has contributed to an environment in which requesters of translation often cannot be certain whether or not a translation meets their needs or the needs of end users and where providers are unclear about what requesters need and want. In response the EU-funded QTLaunchPad project has developer the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework, an open an extensible system for declaring and describing translation quality metrics using a shared vocabulary of “issue types”.

Many problems in the translation industry revolve around customer dissatisfaction with someone’s translation quality and disputes between translators when one is revising the work of the other. To determine whether someone has attained translation quality, one must be able to measure it. To measure translation quality, one must be able to define it. And to define translation quality, one must be able to define both translation and quality. Our two prior articles have addressed these terms respectively. Those articles do not resolve disagreements about these terms; indeed, we authors have unresolved disagreements among ourselves. However, the articles outline how different definitions can radically affect people’s expectations about translation and quality. This third article builds on the first two and presents two contrasting definitions of translation quality, a narrow one and a broad one. The narrow definition matches with the narrow definition of translation in the first article and an emphasis on the transcendent view of quality in the second article, while the broad definition matches with the broad definition of translation the first article and an integration of the five approaches in quality management from the second article. The authors strongly disagree about which definition of translation quality is better for the translation industry. Rather than pretending to be the end of this discussion, it hopes to encourage a continuation of the debate that has taken place among the authors.