Professional or Non-professional? A Case Study on the Quality of Blog Translation

Blogs play an important role in every aspect of our life – from sharing a blogger’s personal life experiences with friends to gaining support from the public in presidential campaigns. There has been a lot of research on blogs, but very little research on blog translation. Blog translation may refer to translation of articles or comments posted in blogs, or any translation done at weblogs. Are the translations in blogs professional or non-professional? What is the quality of blog translation? This paper tries to answer this question through a case study on the quality of Roland Soong’s translation in his famous blog entitled EastSouthWestNorth (ESWN), which, with a great number of translations of important news stories, speeches and comments from Chinese into English, was considered as “a must-read blog on China” for professional journalists working for important mainstream media like New York Times and Washington Post whether these reporters know Chinese or not (Lee 2006). In this article, the quality of translation will be assessed according to the criteria of translation for the Diploma in Translation (DipTrans) developed by the IoL Educational Trust (IoLET) and Chartered Institute of Linguistics (CIOL). The three sample translations will be evaluated according to the criteria of translation set by IoLET and CIOL to see whether they are “professionally usable” (IoL Education Trust 2017:7). The study indicates that, generally speaking, although there is a small portion of the translations at Soong’s EWSN which could contain serious problems, most of the translations could be graded as “Merit” and are “professionally usable”. This means that although Soong’s translations are not perfect, they still provide important reference to journalists and other readers, and have their indispensable value in the news ecosystem. From the analysis of Soong’s translation of these three very different texts, we will achieve a better understanding of the quality of Soong’s translation at his blog, and hopefully this study may shed light on the issue related to the quality of the translation in the blogosphere in general.