Official translation in Europe: Systems and practices

Francisco Vigier, AVANTI research group, University of Granada, Spain

Thanks to the dramatic improvement in transport, the phenomenon of mass tourism and the contemporary migration trends, the world is currently undergoing an unprecedented increase in human mobility. This is especially evident in supranational entities such as the European Union, where specific legislation is deliberately passed in order to remove obstacles which may hinder freedom of movement for persons and services between Member States. Accordingly, there is also an ever increasing number of relationships of all kinds (be they commercial, legal, academic or even personal) between citizens of different nationalities, and subsequently from different cultures and with different languages. This enormous volume of international links leads to a correlative, wide variety of situations demanding language mediation (i.e. translating and interpreting). Since many of these situations must be either sanctioned or witnessed by the authorities (frequently, by courts or other legal institutions), it is quite common to require official translations of documents written in a language different than that used by these authorities. This paper describes how official translation is organised in three different Member States of the European Union with three very different professional frameworks: the United Kingdom (where there is so far no regulated profession regarding official translation), Spain (where there is a profession with a long tradition in this field, but not clearly regulated) and Greece (where a new system of sworn translators has just been established, which has caused considerable debate in this country). Through this comparison, this paper presents the most prominent aspects of these systems as well as the most frequent practices in these countries as far as official translation is concerned, in order to highlight once more the need for harmonisation of standards in (official) translation and interpreting across Europe.

Developing information mining competence in legal translation training

Anastasia Atabekova, Head of Foreign Languages Department, Faculty of Law, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Moscow

Legal translation is a part of multilingual communication in Europe. Thus, some general requirements and guidelines for multilingual translation within EU framework are necessary to tailor the EU messages to the national audiences in their language.

While EMT competences are discussed a lot is written and said about translation service provision, language, intercultural, thematic and technological competence. What concerns information mining competence it is often shadowed in the background though it is this sort of competence that provides for adequate translation of specialized legal concepts that reflect peculiarities of legal culture in legal discourse context. The relevant skills to identify and highlight key conceptual information aspects, strategies for specialized concepts understanding and terminological processing can be trained in case teachers design concept information processing courses that imply training skills to visualise contents of legal documents, to create their profiles and maps, to extract terminology from subject-specific text collections with a special focus on stylistic devices (i.e. names proper, allusions, metaphors, metonymy, epithet) that legal terms are often formed by with the aim of their further extended and detailed interpretation by means of another language. This list (though it is not supposed to be complete) define skills that should be trained to provide adequate legal culture concepts interpretation in the course of specialized information processing.

Automatising genre metadata for the management of multilingual communication in legal domains

Anabel Borja Albi, Esther Monzó, GENTT Group. Universitat Jaume I, Castellón

The aim of this contribution is to present the research project that the GENTT Group is currently developing in collaboration with the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunidad Valenciana in Spain (the Valencian Community Higher Court of Justice).  In this new project the GENTT group intends to take one step further towards its objective to create an intelligent management system for specialised multilingual documents which allows the automatisation of the process of retrieval, indexation, semi-controlled writing and computer-assisted translation of specialised texts, taking into account the professional needs, habits and processes of the final users of these texts.

Since 2000 the GENTT research group has been working on the analysis of the application of the concept of “textual genre” (comprising its formal, communicative and cognitive dimensions) to conduct research on the drafting and translation of specialised texts within socio-professional domains. The methodology of GENTT combines corpus analysis techniques and methodological principles of the sociology of professions (Borja, 2005; Engberg, 2008; García Izquierdo, ed. 2005; Orlikovski y Yates, 2002).

Creation of a terminology data base for the Austrian Asylum Law

Irmgard Soukup-Unterweger, Tanja Wissik, Universities of Vienna and Graz

The Universities of Vienna (Centre for Translation Studies) and Graz (Department of Translation Studies) in cooperation with the Federal Asylum Office and with the support of UNHCR carried out a double-project "Creation of a terminology data base for the Austrian asylum law" and "Distribution of information material on asylum proceedings in Austria". The project was financially supported by the European Refugee Fund.

The project had two main aims. One of them was the creation of a terminology data base in the field of asylum and immigration law for professional interpreters and translators as well as for lay interpreters, who are being employed in proceedings in the first and second instance. Furthermore, information material provided by the Federal Asylum Office for new asylum applicants according to the Austrian asylum law was being evaluated regarding its comprehensibility from the perspective of the target group.

In this presentation the first part of the project, the terminology data base for the Austrian asylum law will be presented. As an introduction the Austrian asylum proceedings will be outlined. Moreover the terminological characteristics of the Austrian asylum terminology in contrast to the EU asylum terminology will be discussed. One motivation for the creation of the data base was the lack of monolingual or multilingual reference material in the area of asylum law. The other was the lack of knowledge about the asylum law terminology that had been criticized by the authorities. Therefore the data base can be regarded as a contribution to quality assurance in translation and interpretation in this area. The data base is available online and contains 72 entries in German, Arabic, English, Russian and Serbian as well as 83 entries in German and Russian. An enlargement of the data base is planned in order to extend the existing entries to all languages and integrate more languages.