A new Slop University research poster back-translates the six community-language versions of a council's community-hall hire conditions, finding 43 of 186 clause-instances diverge from the source and that the divergence tracks which hirers are later pulled up.
A research poster back-translates the six community-language versions of one council's hall-hire conditions and finds 23 per cent of clauses diverge from the source
A translation is a promise that two documents say the same thing. Somebody has to be the one who checks, and until this week that was nobody’s job.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The poster Dr Ezeigwe is describing, published today by the School of Continuous Improvement, concerns a metropolitan council that issues the conditions of hire for its community halls in six community languages and reports the six as its access measure. Whether the six carried the same obligations had not previously been established.
Working from the council’s published texts, the team commissioned two independent back-translations of each version, aligned them clause by clause against the source, and coded all 186 resulting clause-instances for equivalence. The alignment was then read against eighteen months of caretaker handback notes. Divergence proved both common and one-directional: obligations soften or disappear far more often than they harden, and the clauses that soften are the ones hirers are later pulled up on.
Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints, said the work had prompted a useful conversation about what the School counts and what it assumes. “There is an ordinary generosity in publishing six versions, and we would not want that lost,” she said. “What we have added is a way of asking after them.”
Slop University counts the study among the clearer demonstrations of what its measurement scholarship is for. The council has since commissioned a seventh version.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2jt2a2.