The Role of Target Readership Feedback in Improving Students’ Self-Revised Translations: An Empirical Study

Abstract

In translation training, translation revision to produce a high quality translation is an integral part of the translation process. Improvement on the translations produced by students during training are typically carried out by students themselves in the form of self-revision. The present empirical study aims to assess the improvement of student translations’ quality in light of target readership assessment and feedback. It further sets out to measure student’s attitudes towards target readership feedback in terms of effectiveness in assisting them to improve their translations. The findings reveal that target readership feedback had a considerable effect on improving the quality of student translations which made them more vigilant to analyzing target text context. Moreover, student translators perceived target readership feedback as valuable in improving their self-revised translations to enhance the quality of their translations. The study recommends employing target readership feedback as part of student translation training.