Target-Language Accuracy and Naturalness
Accuracy asks whether the target text means the same thing; naturalness asks whether it reads as though written for the target audience. A translation can be grammatically correct yet unidiomatic, and exam questions often exploit exactly that gap. Candidates should understand collocation, register, information structure (theme and rheme), cohesion, genre conventions, and the difference between explicitation and unnecessary addition.
Source-language interference is the main enemy. Calques-word-for-word borrowings of structure-produce phrases that are understandable but foreign. False friends create meaning errors. Overuse of passive voice, repeated pronouns, stacked nouns, and transferred punctuation are common symptoms. Another trap is “false fluency”: a sentence that sounds smooth but shifts emphasis, weakens a claim, or changes the relationship between clauses. Naturalness does not license paraphrase that loses content; accuracy does not require awkward literalism.
Worked example: English “make a decision” becomes Spanish “tomar una decisión,” not “hacer una decisión.” The verb is selected by collocation, not by dictionary equivalence. Similarly, English “heavy rain” corresponds to Spanish “lluvia fuerte” or “gran lluvia,” not a literal “lluvia pesada.”
Rule of thumb: draft for sense, then revise with the source covered. Read the target aloud, check doubtful collocations in a corpus or parallel text, and verify that sentence rhythm and emphasis suit the genre. If a natural phrasing changes meaning, compensate elsewhere rather than forcing the source structure. Naturalness is audience-shaped, not merely grammatical.