Institutional Translation And Interpreting

This collection brings together new insights around current translation and interpreting practices in national and supranational settings. The book illustrates the importance of further reflection on issues around quality and assessment, given the increased development of resources for translators and interpreters. The first part of the volume focuses on these issues as embodied in case studies from a range of national and regional contexts, including Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United States. The second part takes a broader perspective to look at best practices and questions of quality through the lens of international bodies and organizations and the shifting roles of translation and interpreting practitioners in working to manage these issues. Taken together, this collection demonstrates the relevance of critically examining processes, competences and products in current institutional translation and interpreting settings at the national and supranational levels, paving the way for further research and quality assurance strategies in the field. The Introduction, Chapter 7, and Conclusion of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This collection brings together new insights around current translation and interpreting practices in national and supranational settings. The book illustrates the importance of further reflection on issues around quality and assessment, given the increased development of resources for translators and interpreters. The first part of the volume focuses on these issues as embodied in case studies from a range of national and regional contexts, including Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United States. The second part takes a broader perspective to look at best practices and questions of quality through the lens of international bodies and organizations and the shifting roles of translation and interpreting practitioners in working to manage these issues. Taken together, this collection demonstrates the relevance of critically examining processes, competences and products in current institutional translation and interpreting settings at the national and supranational levels, paving the way for further research and quality assurance strategies in the field.

This collection re-envisions the academic study of institutional translation and interpreting (ITI), uncovering the ways in which institutional practices have inhibited knowledge creation and encouraging stakeholders to continue to challenge the assumptions and epistemics which underpin the field. ITI is broadly conceived here as translation and interpreting delivered in or for specific organizations and institutional social systems, spanning national, supranational, and international organizations as well as financial markers, universities, and national courts. This volume is organized around three sections, which collectively interrogate the knower – the field itself – to engage in questions around “how we know what we know” in ITI and how institutions have contributed to or hindered the social practice of knowledge creation in ITI studies. The first section challenges the paths which have led to current epistemologies of ignorance while the second turns the critical lens on specific institutional practices. The final section explores specific proposals to challenge existing epistemologies by broadening the scope of ITI studies. Giving a platform to perspectives which have been historically marginalized within ITI studies and new paths to continue challenging dominant assumptions, this book will appeal to scholars and policymakers in translation and interpreting studies.

The volume of economic, business, financial and institutional translation increases daily. Governments strive to produce plain and accessible information. Institutions and agencies operate in more than one language. Multinationals produce documents in multiple languages to expand their services worldwide, and large businesses and SMEs also have to adopt a multilingual approach for accessing new markets in new countries. Translation and interpreting training institutions are aware of the increasing need for training in this area. This awareness is evident in their curricula, which include subjects related to these areas of activity. Trainers and researchers are increasingly interested in knowing and researching the intricacies and aspects of this type of translation. This peer-reviewed publication, resulting from ICEBFIT 2016, echoes the voices of translation practitioners, researchers, and teachers, as well as other parties gathered to discuss new issues in institutional translation and business, finance and accounting translation, as well as, in a larger sense, specialized translation.

This collection surveys the translator training landscape in international organizations on a global scale, offering a state-of-the-art view on institutional translator training research and practical takeaways for stakeholders. The volume’s focus on training brings a unique perspective to existing research on institutional translation, which has tended to single out such themes as agency, professionalism, and quality. The book is divided into three sections, with the first outlining the competences required of institutional translators, the second exploring training practices at the university level and "on the job", for novices and professionals, across a range of settings, and the third providing a synthesis of the above. Contributions draw on findings from studies in both institutional desiderata and existing training programmes from diverse geographic contexts towards situating the discussion through a global lens. In linking together competences and training practices, the book enhances collective knowledge of institutional translation and provides valuable insights for universities and institutions that work with translators on both international and national scales. This book will be key reading for scholars in translation studies, particularly those interested in institutional translation and translator training, as well as active professionals. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This collection re-envisions the academic study of institutional translation and interpreting (ITI), revealing oppression in established institutional spaces toward challenging existing policies and the myths which inhibit critical inquiry within the field. ITI is broadly conceived here as translation and interpreting delivered in or for specific institutions, understood as social systems and spanning national, supranational, and international organizations as well as immigration detention centers, prisons, and national courts. The volume is organized around three parts, which explore ITI spaces and practices revealing oppressive practices, dispelling myths regarding translation and interpreting, and shedding light on institutional spaces that have remained invisible and hidden, and therefore underexplored. The chapters in this book vividly illustrate similarities and contrasts between the different contexts of ITI, revealing shared power dynamics that uphold social hierarchies. Throughout this comparison, the book makes a compelling case to consider the different contexts of ITI as equally contributing to actionable knowledge on how institutions shape translation and interpreting and how these are operated in sustaining such hierarchies. Offering a window into previously underexplored spaces and generating new lines of inquiry within ITI studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and policymakers in translation and interpreting studies.

Translating Institutions outlines a framework for research on translation in institutional settings, using the Finnish translation unit at the European Commission as a case study. Because of their foundational multilingualism, the institutions of the European Union could be described as both translating and translated institutions. The European Commission alone employs nearly two thousand translators, and it is translators who draft the vast majority of outgoing EU messages. Translating Institutions sets out to explore the organizational role and professional identity of this group of cultural mediators, a group that has remained relatively invisible despite its size and central institutional role, and to use the analysis of this data to elaborate broader methodological and theoretical issues. Translating Institutions adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the life and work of the translators at the centre of this study. In practice, this entails employing a number of different methods and interrogating various types of data. The three-level research design used covers the study of the institutional framework, the study of translators working in specific institutional settings, and the study of translated documents and their source texts. This is therefore a study of both texts and people in their institutional habitat. Given the methodological focus of the volume, the different methods and data are outlined in independent chapters: the institutional framework of translation (institutional ethnography), the physical location of the unit (observation), translators' own views of their role (focus group discussions), and a sociologically-oriented text analysis of a sample document (shifts analysis). Translating Institutions constitutes a valuable contribution to the sociology of translation. It opens up new avenues for research and offers a detailed framework for the study of institutional translation.

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.