User:Mollygriffith/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article

 * 1) I chose hose to read legal translation because I thought this topic was interesting as we live in a multilingual society. All of the content seemed to be relevant to the topic—issues related to translating in legal contexts. As far as the structuring of the content goes, I think it could have been done better by including headlines, such as one on intransparency or one on translation theory; this would help make the article not seem like a wall of text. In fact, the bit about intransparency in the very first paragraph should not be in the lead, but in a separate paragraph. A good addition to this article would be examples of 'good' translations and 'bad' translations, so that the reader could really understand why thoughtful translations are important to minimize misunderstandings or legal repercussions. Also, the diagram provided in the article needs to be explained a bit. It describes how the complexity of legal translation increases depending on 'legal families,' but nowhere in the article does it mention anything about legal families, so I'm not even sure what legal families even are or why that would make translation more complex.
 * 2) The tone of the article does seem to be neutral, but a lack of citations makes some claims seem like they are opinions. For example, "[jurists] often view [verbatim] as a clear standard of quality that they desire in TT." The author provides no evidence for this claim, and words like 'often view' make the claim seem very imprecise--how exactly often is 'often'? It seems like it is the author's viewpoint that jurists often view verbatim this way.
 * 3) This article's sources aren't the best. For example, one source, "Translating international gender-equality institutional/legal texts: The example of 'gender' in Spanish" can only be accessed by purchasing it. This is a fundamental issue for Wikipedia, because it is intentionally supposed to be a free encyclopedia. Another source, "All New Theories And Concepts About Translation In New Century" has a missing or empty url. It needs to be updated. Also, there is no 'reference' section; just a "relevant literature" section.
 * 4) A flaw of this article is its lack of inline citations. There are none at all. At one point in the article, the author writes "(see e.g. Nielsen 2010)," which would have been a great place to include an inline citation, yet there isn't one. Because she doesn't cite anything, I'm not sure what the author is forming their claims off of.
 * 5) The very beginning of the Talk Page shows that the article on legal translation is part of two WikiProjects: WikiProject Translation Studies and WikiProject Law. For both projects, this article is rated as a Start-Class and has received no ratings on the importance scale. The first comment on the talk page is the need for inline citations, but what is interesting is that the member who asserts this need says so because this article is the very first result when 'legal translation' is googled. Secondly, someone mentions that there are blacklisted links found in the article. They mention that this doesn’t necessarily mean these links are banned, and they can request that these links be whitelisted.

--Mollygriffith