The qualification/hybrid stage of the annual translation contest will be extended until September 26

Jared Tabor wrote:

Hi Michael,

Basically, in this instance, the level of entry rating is not what it should be in comparison to the number of entries. So the idea is to focus better on getting a level of entry rating that will more clearly determine finalists.

Jared

B D Finch wrote:



I have spent some time marking and rating a few of the entries in French to English. Unfortunately, the level of the entries I read was, to put it mildly, abysmal. Not one of the entries I marked appeared to have been written by a person with the basic skills to be a professional translator in this language pair. They all seemed to have been entered by non-native speakers of English. To give a flavour of it, several entrants didn't even know that in English, unlike in French, pronouns agree with the subject. So e.g. Ulric's room is his room, not her room. Some didn't seem to understand much French either. In one case, long passages were mistranslated because the competitor had clearly completely misunderstood the source text at a level one would not expect of a GCE "A" level candidate.

Unless some control is exercised, over both what language pairs people may enter and mark, this competition cannot be taken seriously and it should, obviously, be impossible for contestants to mark other contestants' entries in their own language pair(s). I agree with other people's comments that judging should be by an appointed (and carefully vetted) panel, not open to the sort of abuse that has been reported and not open to just anyone who may be suffering from a delusion that they know enough to mark entries in a particular language pair. To be fair, I did not see any evidence of abusive marking by others in the entries I marked. I did see a number of likes and dislikes that I considered to be unfounded or wrong, but had no reason to think they were the result of deliberate abuse of the system. Nearly all of the previous likes and dislikes were clearly from competent markers. Some didn't take the trouble to categorise their likes or dislikes; e.g. grammatical errors were shown as spelling errors.

I know that there are many ProZians who are capable of producing excellent entries, but perhaps they, like myself, would not want to enter a competition with such a lack of credibility. I will not bother marking any more entries this year and will not mark any next year unless steps are taken to improve the standard.

[Edited at 2014-09-06 18:10 GMT]

Elizabeth Tamblin wrote:

After looking at the comments for the first time in ages, I am appalled by the nonsensical remarks by people who obviously have no understanding of the text.

I now regret participating in this contest. Unless there is a properly-appointed panel of judges, it is not a contest at all, in my opinion.

And I will not be rating other contestants' entries either.

Cecilia Civetta wrote:



This happens every time! Participants tend to fill their competitors' entries with plenty of "disagrees".
So if you get any "disagrees" that don't make any sense, you can be sure they come from a competitor!
On the other hand, some seem to have had their translations done by Google Translate, at least in my language pairs (seriously!). Can't understand what their purpose could be!

Beatriz Ramírez de Haro wrote:
I realized that my entries were pulled to pieces by unqualified reviewers brandishing recently learned grammar rules. ... I was expecting a serious jury.

Diana Di Battista wrote:
Having paid judges would also eliminate the incentive of peer reviewers to down-vote their competitors' entries. An alternative would be to maintain the peer review aspect, but have the paid judges make the final decision.