Translation quality and its assessment are of great importance in the context of human as well as machine translation. Methods range from human annotation and assessment to quality metrics and estimation, where the former are rather time-consuming. Furthermore, assessing translation quality is a subjective process. Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) represents a time-efficient annotation method to obtain subjective preferences, the best and the worst in a given set and their ratings. In this paper, we propose to use BWS for a comparative translation quality assessment of one human and three machine translations to German of the same source text in English. As a result, ten participants with a translation background selected the human translation most frequently and rated it overall as best closely followed by DeepL. Participants showed an overall positive attitude towards this assessment method.

Quality assurance is a central component of human and machine translation. In translation studies, translation quality focuses on human evaluation and dimensions, such as purpose, comprehensibility, target audience among many more. Within the field of machine translation, more operationalized definitions of quality lead to automated metrics relying on reference translations or quality estimation. A joint approach to defining and assessing translation quality holds the promise to be mutually beneficial. To contribute towards that objective, this systematic survey provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the concept of translation quality from both perspectives. Thereby, it seeks to inspire cross-fertilization between both fields and further development of an interdisciplinary concept of translation quality.