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Abstract Background Translation quality assessment (TQA) suffers from subjectivity in both neighboring disciplines: ‘TEFL’ and ‘Translation Studies, and more empirical studies are required to get closer to objectivity in this domain. The present study evaluated the quality of the written translation of TEFL students through three different approaches to translation quality assessment (TQA) in order to examine the efficiency and reliability of the three methods and ultimately suggest the most reliable one. Methods Thirty BA TEFL university students translated a text from English into Persian, and three raters scored the translated texts through three different methods of assessment. Results The results of statistical analysis indicated that, the error analysis method B was more reliable than holistic method C, but was less reliable than combined method D. Conclusions That is, when we combined the results of both error analysis and holistic methods in a proportion of 70/30, the new combined error analysis-holistic method got a better reliability rating, and accurate results than holistic and analytic methods. Therefore, the combined method may be suggested as a reliable method for evaluating and scoring the TEFL students’ translations.