The Impact Of Raters’ Academic Backgrounds And Rating Experiences On The Rating Validity And Reliability Of C-E Translation Assessment In Universities

The wave of globalization stimulates the demand of the society for translation talents,which triggers attention and emphasis on the cultivation of translation ability and translation assessment.Due to direct reflection of test-takers’ translation ability,translation assessment has been widely used in foreign language teaching and various large-scale standardized examinations.But translation assessment is inevitably of subjective features due to human rating.Thus,it is not easy to ensure its rating validity and reliability which are affected by test-takers,translation items and raters.In terms of raters’ effects,previous studies found that raters’ interaction with rating methods and raters’ academic backgrounds exerted impacts on the rating validity and reliability,which further made the fairness of translation assessment controversial.Therefore,conducting research on validity and reliability based on the raters’ backgrounds and how to promote raters’ rating validity and reliability have been one of heated topics in the vein of translation assessment.This study aimed to explore the impacts of raters’ academic backgrounds and rating experiences on the rating validity and reliability of translation assessment.To achieve this purpose,this study took a final examination,which was 30 C-E translation texts written by English-major students from a university as samples and invited two groups of university English teachers(12 in total)with different academic backgrounds and rating experiences as raters to voluntarily participate in rating.In the first stage,12 raters were classified according to their academic backgrounds into raters researching translation literature(abbreviated to translation raters)and raters researching English literature(abbreviated to English raters).In the second stage,12 raters were divided according to their rating experiences into raters with experiences in rating translation items of large-scale standardized English tests(abbreviated to participants)and raters without such experiences(abbreviated to non-participants).And then this study used generalizability theory to analyze their rating scores.The results of the study showed that,(1)raters’ academic backgrounds affected the rating validity and reliability of translation assessment slightly.Compared with English raters,translation raters maintained rating consistency better and had higher rating validity and reliability.(2)Raters’ rating experiences exerted significant effects on the rating validity and reliability of translation assessment.Compared with participants,non-participants maintained rating consistency more difficultly and scored poorly in terms of rating validity and reliability.The results provide a new perspective to conduct empirical studies of translation assessment.Meanwhile,the results supply plenty of information to decision-makers,universities and foreign language teachers so as to improve the rating validity and reliability of translation assessment and make positive backwash of translation assessment to foreign language teaching efficient.