DocumentationComptes rendus

Prieto Ramos, Fernando, ed. (2018): Institutional Translation for International Governance. Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 228 p.[Record]

  • Oumarou Mal Mazou

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  • Oumarou Mal Mazou
    Université de Liège, Liège, Belgique

Institutional translation has been garnering much interest in the field of translation studies, considering the increasing number of publications since the 1970s, though most of the research is carried out within national settings (Covacs 1979). In fact, translation studies in intergovernmental organizations remain limited and, in this regard, the book under review contributes to fill this gap. Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, a leading scholar in the field of legal translation and international organizations, the book includes papers by a selection of guest authors as well as outputs from a Consolidator Grant project led by the editor. It consists of 13 interrelated chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, entitled Contemporary Issues and Methods assembles three chapters. In the first one, Susan Šarčević (p. 9-24) focuses on the challenges that institutional translators face and their role as transnational multilingual communicators. The author takes examples from the multilingual text production in the European Commission to highlight the main task of translators, which is: “to preserve the unity of the single instrument with the ultimate aim of promoting its uniform interpretation and application in practice” (p. 13). We can thus say that the challenge of the translator of legal texts in institutional settings is to ensure consistency in terminology, i.e. internal harmonization of multilingual texts: “the greatest challenge to institutional legal translators is learning to go beyond surface-level similarity” (p. 23). To overcome the above-stated challenge, the translator must have interdisciplinary skills and the mastery of the subject matter. In that regard, Šarčević encourages translation schools all over the world to provide necessary interdisciplinary training so that translators are equipped with the skills that enable them to become transnational communicators and bring quality to institutional multilingualism. In the same regard, the second chapter (p. 25-36), authored by Łucja Biel, investigates corpora in institutional legal translation. She highlights the evolution and importance of using corpus and technological tools in legal translation both for the practitioners and scholars in generating resourceful terminological data. For practitioners, “corpus tool can improve the efficiency of the translation process thanks to fast information retrieval, precision of searches and contextualization of information with usage preferences” (p. 34). Nonetheless, the author deplores the slow uptake of corpus tools by practicing translators as illustrated in the different surveys she presents. The chapter equally highlights some of the new corpus tools to be used by legal translators (especially JodGENTT and TermWise) which have already been tested and proven to be efficient tools. The last chapter of this first part of the book focuses on comparative law and legal translation. The author, Jan Engberg, considers the two disciplines are complementary to each other when it comes to transferring knowledge. Based on frame semantics as an analytical framework, this last chapter describes and evaluates the terminological decisions the translator has to make when dealing with legal translation. The second part of the book, entitled Translation Quality Assessment in Law-and Policy-making and Implementation, also the longest part –and the core- of the book, is divided into six chapters, all dealing with translation quality as explicitly stated in the title. In the first chapter of this second part, Ingemar Strandvik takes a ‘journey’ into the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. As an insider and quality manager of this institution, the seasoned legal translator calls for a ‘more structured approach to quality assurance’ such that the EU “speaks with one consistent institutional voice in each of the EU’s official languages” (p. 51). In a ‘six-stop’ journey, the author maps out a thorough landscape of the institution, its mission as concerns translation (in-house and …

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