The profiles and specific skills required to work for the translation services of international organizations (IOs) have only been the subject of a few descriptive studies, mostly by in-house practitioners. As with other aspects of institutional translation, the earliest substantial contributions on translator profiles focused on translation for European Union (EU) institutions, and particularly the EU's largest translation service, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). Three DGT translators, Emma Wagner, Svend Bech, and Jesús M. Martínez, published a comprehensive account of the role, recruitment, and tasks of translators in the main EU institutions in 2002, subsequently updated in 2012 (Wagner, Bech, and Martínez 2012). Around this same period, a coordinated effort was made to describe the requirements, practices, and training needs of translators in multiple institutions with a focus on legal translation, including at several intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), namely the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and INTERPOL (Borja Albi and Prieto Ramos 2013).Since then, the field of institutional translation has benefited from increasing research and cooperation between translation services and academia. In the expanding landscape of institutional translation studies, analyses of specific genres and institutions predominate, while interinstitutional studies remain scarce. This is apparent in the case of research on institutional translators' profiles. Work by the UN's Anne Lafeber (2012, 2017) broke new ground by comparing the skills required for institutional translation at more than 20 IOs, as reported by their translation staff. The LETRINT project on institutional translation 1 has also recently produced a study of the duties and challenges of translation service managers based on interviews and analyses of job descriptors (Prieto Ramos 2017a), as well as a comparative study of institutional translators' backgrounds and domain specializations through a survey of 12 IOs (Prieto Ramos 2020a).
Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results. This is especially true when the target population of texts under examination is very large and transcends a restricted area of specialization and/or covers multiple genres, as in the case of texts translated in institutional settings. This paper describes the multilayered sequential approach to corpus building applied in a comparative study on legal translation in three of these settings. The approach is based on a full mapping and categorization of institutional texts from a legal perspective; it applies an innovative combination of stratified sampling techniques integrating quantitative and qualitative criteria adapted to the research aims. The resulting corpora, categorization matrix and selection records, together with the methodological detail provided, can be useful for building other multi-genre corpora in translation studies and further afield.
This paper presents the main findings of a study on the translation of national court names in United Nations texts as an illustrative group of culture-bound terms. It focuses on documents produced as part of several mandatory compliance monitoring procedures in the field of human rights. The study is part of a broader project on legal translation in international organisations (LETRINT), which considers terminological consistency and adequacy as indicators of translation quality, and examines the impact of legal asymmetry on both dimensions. To shed light on the first of these indicators, a comprehensive analysis of intertextual and intratextual variations of English-Spanish and French-Spanish translations of thirty terms was conducted. Over five thousand bi- and trilingual segments, extracted from three ad-hoc multilingual and parallel corpora, were examined. They cover the period between 2000 and 2017, and refer to six legal systems. At the intertextual level, the results corroborate that legal asymmetry has a significant impact on translation decision-making, while the assessment of intratextual variation points to a link between source text length, documental series and the degree of terminological consistency.
Institutional term banks (ITBs), such as Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE) in the European Union (EU) institutions and UNTERM in the United Nations, are key sources for the language services of these institutions, and are also used by many other translators and language professionals. These resources are considered authoritative in the translation of institution-specific terminology. However, previous studies have revealed reliability gaps in the content of ITB records, particularly for terms borrowed from specific legal traditions that are used in international legal settings and terms designating singular concepts of national legal systems. This chapter reports further research into the potential causes for such issues and the extent to which terminological records meet institutional translators’ needs. To this end, data were collected through several methods as part of the LETRINT project on legal translation in international institutional settings: (1) interviews with institutional terminologists on the approaches applied to build legal term records for IATE, UNTERM and CuriaTerm (which was initially developed for the needs of the Court of Justice of the EU and later migrated into IATE); (2) an evaluation of ITB relevance and reliability by institutional translators through a survey of 190 respondents; and (3) an assessment of 79 IATE and UNTERM records for 30 terms (of three degrees of legal singularity) from the perspective of translation-oriented legal lexicography. The triangulated results provide evidence of the benefits of applying a systematic legal lexicography approach in the case of CuriaTerm. They also point to significant correlations between translators’ evaluation of IATE and UNTERM for legal translation and the reliability and completeness variations detected in the analysis of illustrative records for each ITB and degree of legal singularity.
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