Applying assessment holistic method to the translation exam in Yemen

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to guide the teachers how the assessment process should be and it highlights the effectiveness and suitability of adopting the holistic method of assessment. This method was applied to the correction of students’ translations of the final exam containing different texts to be translated in both directions between English and Arabic. The exam was done by 36 female students at the Faculty for Women – Seiyun, Yemen on the undergraduate degree course of Translation (2). The hypothesis regarding the suitability and effectiveness of using the assessment holistic method and the possibility to improve the quality of the assessing the students’ translations in future based on this method has not been verified. This study concluded that the main factor which is clearly identifiable was translation competence and that this method was found out to be too lenient to give impartial translation quality assessment for the students’ translations.