THE EFFECTS OF TRANSLATION ON READABILITY

This investigation studied the effects of translating French into English and how readability changed following the translation. French works were paired with English translations of the same works. Flesch Reading Ease scores were significantly lower for the French indicating that the English translations were more easily read than the French originals. Different English translations of the same French work were paired and very little difference resulted. The position that readability measures difficulty of style was confirmed. During the past forty or fifty years the measurement of how readable our reading material really is has become increasingly important. Among many other interested people, Rudolf Flesch (1948) developed a formula to measure readability. The formula yields what he called a Reading Ease score. This formula has been widely used with English and has been tried with foreign languages. Since very little readability research has taken place with other languages it is only natural to attempt to apply English formulas to. other languages (Klare, 1963). However, since these formulas were devised for use with English they are not necessarily applicable to other languages without making some modifications. Klare (1963) stated that readability formulas measure difficulty of style. In dealing with translations the style of a passage is essentially set by the original writer. If the text of a passage is translated into a different language the difficulty of style should be approximately the same in both languages. This assumes, of course, that the translator stuck to the business of translation without modifying the text. This investigation studied what the effects of translation are on readability of a given text and how it varies after translation. The subject languages were French and English. It was hypothesized that the Reading Ease (R. E.) scores of French and English versions of the same text would differ. Further, it was expected that different translations of the same text would be reasonably consistent since the style was predetermined by the original writer