Tõlkeuudiste kvaliteedi analüüs Postimees Online'i ja Delfi näitel

Abstract

University of Tartu Faculty of Philosophy Institute of Germanic, Romance and Slavonic Languages and Literatures Kerti Kulper Tõlkeuudiste kvaliteedi analüüs Postimees Online'i ja Delfi näitel QualityAssessment of Translated News Based on Postimees Online and Delfi Master's thesis 2014 The aim of this thesis was to analyze the quality of translated news that are being published daily in Postimees Online and Delfi – two of the biggest Estonian news agencies. Although news are translated from Russian, Finnish, German and other languages, the main focus of this thesis were the news that have been translated from English to Estonian. The reason is that the biggest amount of translated news originate from English websites. The analysis was motivated by the fact that hundreds of news stories are translated every day and they reach thousands of people, thus the quality of the news should be very good. As there are frequent complaints concerning the quality of translated news, the author decided to investigate the problem further. The thesis is divided into two major parts. The first concentrates on why it is important to translate news, why did the author choose Postimees Online and Delfi, and why we should pay attention to the language that is being used in the news stories. In connection with that, the author of this thesis also examined how the language of news is regulated in Estonia and what exactly is Clear Writing and how to apply it when writing news. The second part of the thesis is the analysis of different news. The author analyzed about 100 news articles during 11 months and chose 40 translated news for further analysis. The findings were divided into 11 categories. Among those categories were Vocabulary, Translation Mistakes, Misprints and Sentence Construction. The analysis was sentence-based, since there were good and bad examples in many translated news. The thesis could be useful for news agencies because based on the analysis of translated news, the leaders of the news agencies could analyze their employees work and make necessary changes so that, if needed, the quality of translated news would improve.