Scoring the top end

Marking or scoring anything more subjective than a multiple-choice question is challenging enough, but finding words to qualify the resulting scores more so. Financial times wine writer extraordinaire Jancis Robinson (extraordinaire for her palate and her writing) qualifies wine tasting scores between 12 to 20 as follows:

20: Truly exceptional

19: A humdinger
18: A cut above average
17: Superior
16: Distinguished
15: Average, a perfectly nice drink with no faults but not much excitement
14: Deadly dull
13: Borderline faulty or unbalanced
12: Faulty or unbalanced.

Perhaps a similar scale could be used to score top-of-the-market translations and transcreations?

​Her latest survey of the worldwide wine market is here.​

For top-of-the-market translations and transcreations, might I suggest:

20: Truly exceptional

19: A humdinger
18: A cut above average
17: Superior
16: Distinguished
15: Average, a perfectly acceptable translation but not much excitement
14: Correct as regards equivalence of meaning, also grammatically correct, but deadly dull
13: Correct as regards equivalence of meaning, but beginning to plod, perhaps the odd lapse of idiom or noncompliance with OSASCOMPN (see post below)

12: Minor shortcomings regarding equivalence of meaning, target-language idioms or grammar

... And so the list might go on.

Oh, and if that doesn't sound anything like the scoring systems proposed for translation quality assurance, it's no accident. We're talking about a completely different paradigm.