This guide is a companion to the English Translation Style Guide for European Union. For each EU Member State, plus two candidate countries, the guide provides English terms and translations. Most of the individual country sections contain a general introduction and parts on geography, judicial bodies and legal instruments. The guide shows terms in the original language on the left and suggested English translations on the right. General guidance on the translation of geographical names, illustrated by specific examples, can also be found in the English Translation Style Guide for European Union. The translations are based on NUTS — the EU’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics. However, the NUTS regions, when referred to as such, are not translated.

This Style Guide is intended primarily for English-language authors and translators, both in-house and freelance, working for the European Commission. But now that so many texts in and around the EU institutions are drafted in English by native and non-native speakers alike, its rules, reminders and handy references aim to serve a wider readership as well. The Guide is divided into two clearly distinct parts, the first dealing with linguistic conventions applicable in all contexts and the second with the workings of the European Union — and with how those workings are expressed and reflected in English. This should not be taken to imply that ‘EU English’ is different from ‘real English’; it is simply a reflection of the fact that the European Union as a unique body has had to invent a terminology to describe itself. However, the overriding aim in both parts of the Guide is to facilitate and encourage the writing of clear and reader-friendly English.

A guide for translators, about the translation theory, the translation process, interpreting, subtitling, internationalization and localization and computer-assisted translation. A special section is dedicated to the translator's education and associations. The guide include, as annexes, several independent adaptations of the corresponding European Commission works, freely available via the EU Bookshop as PDF and via SetThings.com as EPUB, MOBI (Kindle) and PDF. For a “smart”, sensible translation , you should forget not the knowledge acquired at school or university, but the corrective standards. Some people want a translation with the touch of the source version, while another people feel that in a successful version we should not be able to guess the original language. We have to realize that both people have right and wrong, and that their only fault is to present requirement as an absolute truth. Teachers agree at least on this principle: “If a sentence is ambiguous, the translation must also be“. There is another critical, less easy to argue, based on an Italian phrase with particularly strong wording: “Traduttore, traditore“. This critique argues that any translation will betray the author‘s language, spirit, style … because of the choices on all sides. What to sacrifice, clarity or brevity, if the formula in the text is brief and effective, but impossible to translate into so few words with the exact meaning? One could understand this criticism that it encourages us to read “in the text.” It seems obvious that it is impossible to follow this advice into practice.

Based on thorough and extensive research, this book examines in detail traditional status signals in the translation profession. It provides case studies of eight European and non-European countries, with further chapters on sociological and economic modelling, and goes on to identify a number of policy options and make recommendations on rectifying problem areas.

This volume is a study into the norms that come into play in the translation of European Union legislation. With a focus on expressions of modality, the study adopts a corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies approach to analyse the translation strategies used in a bilingual English/Italian parallel corpus of European Union legislation and identify the most frequent translational patterns. The book outlines the principles at the basis of the multilingual policy at the European Union and provides a detailed outline of the context in which the drafting and translation processes take place as a key to understanding the translational choices. The impact of sometimes contrasting factors such as the conventions of legal drafting at the European Union and those within the target culture, the principle of equal authenticity and the attention to the quality and readability of legislative texts is revealed in the analysis. Evidence in support of the theories concerning translation universals is also found and their implications for EU legal translation are discussed. The results lead to the formulation of several hypotheses as regards the norms governing the translation of EU legislative texts. The book also reflects on the impact that the translational choices have on the development of European Union legal language as an independent variety. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Legal Translation Studies and Linguistics, as well as practising translators.

The institutions of the European Union employ hundreds of translators. Why? What do they do? What sort of translation problems do they have to tackle? Has the language policy of the European Union been affected by the recent inclusion of new Member States? This book answers all those questions. Written by three experienced translators from the European Commission, it aims to help general readers, translation students and freelance translators to understand the European Union institutions and their work. Although it deals with written rather than spoken translation, much of the information it gives will be of interest to interpreters too. This second edition has been updated to reflect the new composition of the EU and changes to recruitment procedures.

This edited volume documents the state of the art in research on translation policies in legal and institutional settings. Offering case studies of past and present translation policies from several parts of the world, it allows for a compelling comparison of attitudes towards translation in varying contexts. The book highlights the virtues of integrating different types of expertise in the study of translation policy: theoretical and applied; historical and modern; legal, institutional and political. It effectively illustrates how a multidisciplinary perspective furthers our understanding of translation policies and unveils their intrinsic link with topics such as multilingualism, linguistic justice, minority rights, and citizenship. In this way, each contribution sheds new light on the role of translation in the everyday interaction between governments and multilingual populations.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of institutional translation issues related to the development of international law and policies for supranational integration and governance. These issues are explored from various angles in selected papers by guest specialists and findings of a large-scale research project led by the editor. Focus is placed on key methodological and policy aspects of legal communication and translation quality in a variety of institutional settings, including several comparative studies of the United Nations and European Union institutions. The first book of its kind on institutional translation with a focus on quality of legal communication, this work offers a unique combination of perspectives drawn together through a multilayered examination of methods (e.g. corpus analysis, comparative law for translation and terminological analysis), skills and working procedures. The chapters are organized into three sections: (1) contemporary issues and methods; (2) translation quality in law- and policy-making and implementation; and (3) translation and multilingual case-law.

The purpose of this volume is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretical background for discussing quality on the one hand, and chapters exploring selected aspects of quality and case studies from both academics and practitioners on the other. Our aim is to present these two approaches as a breeding ground for testing one vis-à-vis the other. This book studies institutional translation mostly through the lens of the European Union (EU) reality, and, more specifically, of EU institutions and bodies, due to the unprecedented scale of their multilingual operations and the legal and political importance of translation. Thus, it is concerned with the supranational (international) level, deliberately leaving national and other contexts aside. Quality in supranational institutions is explored both in terms of translation processes and their products – the translated texts.

This volume investigates advances in the field of legal translation both from a theoretical and practical perspective, with professional and academic insights from leading experts in the field. Part I of the collection focuses on the exploration of legal translatability from a theoretical angle. Covering fundamental issues such as equivalence in legal translation, approaches to legal translation and the interaction between judicial interpretation and legal translation, the authors offer contributions from philosophical, rhetorical, terminological and lexicographical perspectives. Part II focuses on the analysis of legal translation from a practical perspective among different jurisdictions such as China, the EU and Japan, offering multiple and pluralistic viewpoints. This book presents a collection of studies in legal translation which not only provide the latest international research findings among academics and practitioners, but also furnish us with a new approach to, and new insights into, the phenomena and nature of legal translation and legal transfer. The collection provides an invaluable reference for researchers, practitioners, academics and students specialising in law and legal translation, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and semiotics.