Postediting in English-to-Arabic Legal/Political Translation: A Case Study of a Freelancer’s Output

Based on a freelancer’s initial translations of ten documents in legal and political contexts, this case study offers an analysis of 40 errors from a posteditor’s feedback on them. House’s (2015) Translation Quality Assessment Model is used to analyze translation errors into overt and covert errors. The analysis shows 4 error types: terminological errors (8/20%), breaches of target language system errors (13/33%), slight changes in meaning errors (9/22%), and phraseological errors (10/25%). While the first two error types are overt and can be easily spotted by the competent reader, the other two are covert and may escape the reader’s attention. Together, these errors mar the translation product in terms of professionalism, generic and contextual appropriateness, and linguistic accuracy. The study concludes that postediting needs to be an integral part of translation business in order to ensure standard quality.