Avaliação de traduções: análise bibliométrica de artigos publicados em periódicos brasileiros

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the views of Translation Studies (TS) scholars in Brazil on the subject of translation evaluation. A secondary objective was to investigate whether TS scholars in Brazil have examined the issue of evaluation in translator training and, if so, what their views on the subject are. To that end, we searched the websites of 16 TS journals published in Brazil, as well as 38 special online issues of journals in other, related, fields. We used the following search terms and Boolean operators: avaliação OR evaluation OR assessment. The special online issues on Translation were searched manually by looking for any of the following words on the lists of contents: avaliação, avaliar, evaluation, evaluate, assessment, and assess. A total of 67 articles were retrieved from the websites, and an additional 12 were found in the special online issues. Of those 79 articles, 59 were excluded, a total of 20 articles therefore being included in the present study. All 20 articles underwent bibliometric and quantitative data analysis, which was followed by a detailed description of the studies, including objectives, methods, results, and conclusions. Finally, an attempt was made to provide a critical analysis and interpretation of the quantitative data, as well as of the views expressed by the scholars in their studies. The earliest of the studies retrieved was published in 1994, whereas the latest were published in 2021, a period spanning 27 years of research into translation evaluation in Brazil. The highest number of studies published in the same year was 3 (in 2006 and in 2020). The longest interval between published studies on the topic of translation evaluation in Brazil was 8 years (2011-2019). Only two authors published more than one study on the topic in the study period (2 studies each). Most of the researchers, universities, TS journals, and studies were found to hail from the southeastern and southern regions of Brazil, as well as from the Federal District of Brasília. Of the 20 articles included in the present study, 7 (35%) addressed the issue of evaluation in translator training settings. An analysis of the study contents revealed that TS scholars initially sought to apply objective (mostly linguistic and textual) parameters to evaluate translations (of poetic and literary texts for the most part, but also of technical texts in some cases), focusing on the quality of the translated text. Some of the studies examining evaluation in translator training settings suggested a shift in focus away from the texts translated by translation students and toward the students themselves. However, evaluation practices appear to remain primarily focused on the linguistic components of the texts translated by translation students.