Media Translation: Assessing the translation quality of local online information from Kinyarwanda into French and English for foreign audience: A Case study of igihe.com and bwiza.com

Abstract

News translation is a vital communication tool in the age of information sharing, and the quality of the content has an impact on global relationships. It is therefore crucial to assess the calibre of news text translations. There exist multiple media channels in Rwanda; nevertheless, the problems with translation within these news companies arise while translating from other languages into Kinyarwanda or vice versa. In that vein, I carried out this study to evaluate the accuracy of the translations from Kinyarwanda into French and English of two local online media sources: igihe.com and bwiza.com. My specific objectives included: (i) assessing the translation quality of online information published in French and English by Rwandan journalists; (ii) highlighting the journalist-translators’ challenges among online Rwandan media houses; and (iii) raising awareness of the importance of professionalism in translation among media houses to propose a remedy to overcome them. This study was carried out in the Skopos and communicative framework. Furthermore, I tried to assess the news translation quality of two online media namely Igihe.com and Bwiza.com based on the Translation Quality assessment approach by Farahzad (1992) which suggests criteria to follow. Those criteria include appropriateness, accuracy, style, cohesion, and naturalness. Using this approach, I chose four articles from Igihe.com and Bwiza.com to conduct my assessment. According to Schaffner (1998), evaluation based on translation quality criteria varies following the assessment's goal and the theoretical framework the assessor uses to gauge the translation's quality. To determine if the TT corroborates with the ST one should consider its accuracy, correctness, precision, and fairness or else the actual reproduction of the ST, then compare it to the ST. The findings suggest that there are errors in those translated texts including among others; omission, mistranslation, grammatical errors, addition, and over-translation. I also established that some translation units lack correctness, accuracy, appropriateness, and naturalness. Additionally, based on findings and responses from my population sample, I concluded that there is still the poor quality of translation products of these online media which needs to be addressed. It was also found that due to lack of training in translation, journalists encounter many translation challenges (technical terms, metaphor, idioms) in Kinyarwanda, some of which don’t have techniques to solve them.