Institutional translation profiles

Abstract

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).

The impact of specialised translator training and professional experience on legal translation quality assurance: an empirical study of revision performance

“… 3. Contrary to what is inaccurately indicated in Annex B of ISO 20771:2020 (ISO 2020 , 18–19), a law degree is not required as a general rule to translate legislation in the EU institutions or to translate legal texts in IGOs, but it is one of the qualifying degrees for recruitment (see Prieto Ramos and Guzmán 2022 ). The CJEU is the only EU institution where ‘lawyer-linguists’ (with a law degree) systematically work as legal translators, but they typically translate court documents, i.e.…”

“…The assumption that law graduates are better candidates for legal translation than translation graduates was widespread before the proliferation of translation programmes. At the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), for example, a law degree is required to work as a legal translator (with the job title of ‘lawyer-linguist’) (on recent recruitment practices, see Prieto Ramos and Guzmán 2022 ), while the recent ISO standard for legal translation, ISO 20771:2020 (ISO 2020 ), implicitly suggests that a law degree qualifies more directly than a translation degree for professional legal translation. It establishes an additional requirement of ‘the equivalent of at least three years’ full-time professional experience in translating documents within the legal field’ for compliance in the case of law graduates (ISO 2020 , 9), while the same level of experience plus a postgraduate degree in law is required for translation graduates.…”

Revisiting translator competence in the age of artificial intelligence: the case of legal and institutional translation

“…In a subsequent phase of the project, the same LTC model was used to analyse the competence requirements found in 224 vacancy notices for 290 competitions for translator and reviser positions of several organisations of varying sizes and domain specialisations between 2005 and 2020 (Prieto Ramos and Guzmán 2022 ). The vacancy components related to skills and knowledge types fit within the five sub-competence categories of the original model.…”