31.2046, Review: Translation: Prieto Ramos (2019)

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Subject: 31.2046, Review: Translation: Prieto Ramos (2019)

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Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 16:48:56
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Institutional Translation for International Governance

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-4676.html

EDITOR: Fernando  Prieto Ramos
TITLE: Institutional Translation for International Governance
SUBTITLE: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Translation
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Studies
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac, University of Zagreb

SUMMARY

Institutional translation has received increasing attention in translation
studies, especially after the turn of the millennium. Systematic research on
institutional translation, however, has been rather slow to develop and has
tended to focus on case studies. The most scrutinized setting of institutional
translation has been that of the European Union institutions. The interest
generated by the largest multilingual supranational entity in the world
explains the growing number of contributions on discourses and legal
implications of multilingualism. The aim of this volume is to enrich our
understanding of institutional translation for international governance with
regard to key aspects that contribute to the quality of legal communication in
international organizations. A diversity of multilateral and EU institutions
and methods are represented with a view of providing an extensive overview of
current issues and research in institutional translation. The volume consists
of selected contributions by guest authors and outputs of a Consolidator Grant
research project led by the editor from the University of Geneva's Centre for
Legal and Institutional Translation Studies (Transius), where the analysis of
institutional translation at international organizations constitutes the
primary line of research. 

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.

Part One includes three complementary chapters that provide an overview of
contemporary methods and approaches to legal translation. 

Chapter 1: “Challenges to Legal Translators in Institutional Settings” by
Susan Šarčević focuses on legal translation as an act of ‘transnational
communication’, enabling institutional multilingualism to operate on a
regional and global scale in supranational and international law. As a
normative activity, translation of legislation requires maximum precision and
is thus regarded as the most restrictive type of legal translation. This is
especially true in the case of equally authentic legislative texts. From the
legal point of view, all equally authentic legislative texts are presumed to
have the same meaning, unless alleged otherwise. Equal meaning, however, is a
fiction which is seldom achieved in practice.  Legal translators, however, are
expected to produce texts that are equal in legal effect. The translator’s
main task is to preserve the unity of a single instrument with the ultimate
aim of promoting its uniform application and interpretation in practice.  In
this context, the author discusses the central issue of reconciling the legal
translator’s multiple fidelities and (sometimes conflicting) priorities,
especially the commonly institutionalized preference for interlingual
‘surface- level similarity’ between the authentic texts of a single
instrument, on the one hand, and the duty to end users to produce multilingual
legislative texts that meet the requirements of legal certainty, on the other.
The key to effective transnational legal communication is to strike a balance
between foreignization and domestication of terminology, keeping in mind both
the end users and the strategic importance of a term. Creating effective
system-neutral terms requires considerable knowledge of national laws and
legal concepts in order to know which terms could lead to misinterpretation
and should therefore be avoided.  In response to the new challenges,
translators are called upon to take an active role as creators of
transnational legal languages. Finally, institutional translators are
encouraged to become effective transnational communicators who dare to go
beyond the surface-level similarity. The author underlines the fact that
interdisciplinary expertise is required to address the issue, without
excluding the potential room for translational creativity. 

Chapter 2: “Corpora in Institutional Legal Translation: Small Steps and the
Big Picture” by Lucja Biel highlights the growing relevance and sophistication
of corpus-based research in Legal Translation Studies (LTS) in general, and
institutional legal translation in particular.  After experiencing the
‘linguistic turn’ in 1960’s and 1970’s, and the ‘cultural turn’ in 1980’s and
1990’s, Translation Studies (TS) are currently undergoing the ‘technological
turn’, combined with various linguistic methods, including corpus linguistics,
leading to Corpus-Based Translation Studies as a branch of TS. Translations
are analysed mostly with two types of corpora: monolingual comparable corpora
and bilingual parallel corpora.  A combination of the two types of corpora is
required to account for two fundamental types of relations in translation:
that of equivalence, addressing accuracy (parallel corpora), and that of the
textual fit, addressing acceptability (comparable corpora). The chapter
discusses recent developments and trends in Corpus Linguistics as a major
methodological advancement in LTS. The objective is to outline recent
developments and trends in Corpus Legal Translation Studies with implications
for institutional translation practice and research.  The author provides an
overview of advances in corpus use and tools, and their benefits both for
practitioners and researchers, especially in identifying translation patterns
and generating empirical quantitative data. 

Chapter 3: “Comparative Law and Legal Translation as Partners in Knowledge
Communication: Frames as a Descriptive Instrument” by Jan Engberg builds on
the view that institutional legal translation is a form of knowledge
communication, and uses frames as a tool to describe and assess terminological
decisions. The knowledge creation process supported by translation takes
places when receivers from one or more target (legal) cultures construct
knowledge based on the target text produced by the translator from a
pre-existing legal text embedded in a source (legal) culture. The author
presents a method for comparative legal studies with relevance for legal
translation falling under this definition by demonstrating the application of
frame semantic analysis. 

Part Two: “Translation Quality in Law- and Policy-Making and Implementation”
presents the evolution of quality assurance policies at the European
Commission’s Directorate- General for Translation (DGT). 

Chapter 4: “Towards a More Structured Approach to Quality Assurance: DGT's
Quality Journey” by Ingemar Strandvik explains the rationale behind the
increasingly integral, structured and explicit approach to quality, especially
since the major EU enlargement in 2004. The author describes how quality
assurance has evolved over time, with a focus on the impact of some major
quality initiatives on the Directorate-General for Translation’s (DGT) current
structure and work organization. Different aspects of the emerging quality
management policy (quality control, risk assessment, evaluation of outsourced
translations) and future challenges are addressed. The author presents the key
concept of ‘fitness-for-purpose, which is at the core of new international
guidelines for the translation of different text categories. According to this
concept, quality is not an absolute value but it depends on needs and
expectations of different actors and stakeholders. 

Chapter 5: “The Skills Required to Achieve Quality in Institutional
Translation: The Views of EU and UN Revisers” by Anne Lafeber, focuses on a
key aspect of quality assurance: translation competence requirements. Based on
a survey of international translators and revisers, she compares the
skill-sets identified as recruitment priorities for the EU and the UN
translation services, and examines the factors that may explain the
differences found, including divergent structures, revision practices, working
methods and domain specialization. Translation quality assurance at
international organizations depends on the right balance between training,
specialization, risk assessment, workload standards and revision arrangements.

Chapter 6:” Legal Terminology Consistency and Adequacy as Quality Indicators
in Institutional Translation: A Mixed-Method Comparative Study” by Fernando
Prieto Ramos and Diego Guzmán starts from a definition of legal terminology as
‘the most visible and striking feature of legal language (…), and one of the
primary sources of difficulty in translating legal documents’ (Cao 2007).
Decision-making on legal terminology in international organizations, however,
remains largely unexplored. There is a need for more empirical evidence on the
relationship between decision-making patterns (process) and the adequacy of
the resulting translations (product) in the light of the relevant
communicative conditions and the various factors that may have an impact on
quality, such as working procedures, translator profiles, revision practices
and time constraints. The focus of this chapter is on the consistency and
adequacy of terminological decisions in international legal texts and their
correlation with recommendations found in the institutional terminological
databases. The authors apply a corpus-based, mixed-method approach that
combines lexicometric (quantitative) and acceptability (qualitative) approach
analysis to compare consistency and adequacy levels of translations of an
illustrative term (‘due process’) into Spanish at the EU, the UN, and the
World Trade Organization (WTO) over ten years (2005-2015). The findings point
to correlations between product quality indicators, translation process
conditions, and thematic specialization. 

Chapter 7. “Comparing Multilingual Practices in the EU and the Canadian Legal
Systems: The Case of Terminological Choices in Legislative Drafting” by
Agnieszka Doczekalska also focuses on legal terminological choices from a
comparative perspective. She pays particular attention to the legal
implications of drafting multilingual EU legislation in twenty-four languages
as opposed to federal, bilingual, and bijural legislation in Canada. The
overlap of jurisdictions (i.e. national law and EU law in Member States, and
federal law and provincial law in Canadian provinces) and regulated domains
proves especially challenging and conditions the techniques applied to express
EU autonomous concepts, and Canadian bijural concepts. The focus of the
chapter is on legal terminology of EU secondary law and Canadian federal law
that refers mostly to civil and property rights. The character of relations
between federal and provincial laws and supranational and national laws
influences terminological choices and legislative drafting methods.

Chapter 8: “Legal-Linguistic Profiling as Translation Aid: The Example of an
EU Agency” by Colin Robertson outlines the concept of legal-linguistic
profiling of organizations as a way of situating their translation work,
including legal framework, language regime, specialist terminology domains,
and drafting and translation methods. The proposed model is illustrated by the
case of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The purpose of
legal-linguistic profiling is to provide a method for analysing multilingual
and multicultural legal environments in which a text to be translated takes
part. It assists in the identification of the range of genres of legal texts
created by an organization and their functions. The model provides an
overarching view of the operational legal-linguistic, but also technical
environment in which the organization’s legal texts function, which can assist
with terminological decisions and legal translation methodology. The text in
hand may thus be ‘situated’ legally, linguistically, and semiotically within a
wider ‘sea’ of texts.  It may be positioned ‘vertically’ within a given
language in relation to past texts, ‘horizontally’ across languages, and
‘inter-legally’ across different impacting legal systems and legal orders
(national, international, and supranational) where terms may have slightly
different nuances of meaning. In addition, legal-linguistic profiling helps to
reveal the range of users of a text and the variety of legal environments in
which it may be interpreted. This in turn has implications for translation
strategies. 

Chapter 9: “Translating Hybrid Legal Texts for Science and Technology
Institutions: The Case of CERN” Mathilde Fontanet analyses how institutional
domain specialization actually permeates legal texts at the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) as reflected in a parallel
English-French corpus of representative cooperation agreements, safety
documents, and contract adjudication proposals issued between 2013 and 2016.
She describes the structure and conventions applied to each legal genre, and
quantifies the density of technical and legal specialized language in order to
compare the hybridity of texts. The results of the corpus analysis confirm
that technical and legal LSPs cohabit in the documents considered. All the
documents belong to legal genres, produce a legal effect and they follow
macrotextual legal conventions. At microtextual level, when the legal aspect
of a document is clearly more relevant, the technical language takes on a more
archaic form. When the two LSPs are present, the legal LSP functions with a
lower register, while the technical LSP uses a relatively higher register.

Part III: “Translation and Multilingual Case-Law” brings together four
contributions on related aspects of translation and multilingual case-law. The
first two focus on the case-law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU), while
the remaining two chapters focus on the case-law of other international
courts. 

Chapter 10: “The Impact of Multilingualism on the Judgments of the EU Court of
Justice” by Susan Wright provides a very thorough account of the complex
language regime at the Court of Justice of the EU. She discusses how this
regime conditions the drafting of judgements in French and their production in
other European languages. She then raises questions on the challenges that lie
ahead for the CJEU’s translation service in the light of competing objectives,
including the future role of English in EU institutions. In the continuing
effort to ensure that supply keeps pace with the demands of the multilingual
system, the Court’s Translation Service benefits from the Court’s policy on
selective publication and publication by extracts, the system of translation
via pivot languages and the increasing use of information technology.

Chapter 11: “A Corpus Investigation of Translation-Generated Diversity in EU
Case-Law” by Aleksandar Trklja offers a linguist’s insight into one of the key
challenges, namely: how to ensure semantic uniformity in the highly
multilingual context of the CJEU. An investigation of corresponding lexical
items in a parallel corpus of all CJEU judgements published in English, French
and German until 2011 serves to conclude that one-to-one absolute uniformity
is virtually impossible for a number of reasons. First, any communication by
means of natural languages involves indeterminacy because polysemy is an
intrinsic feature of any language. Second, because relations between lexical
items from different languages are non-symmetric and non-transitive, and
third, translation-based communication creates lexical diversity which gives
rise to indeterminacy of meaning. While translation of EU case law creates
diversity, due to the specific dynamics of re-use of established exemplars, it
also prevents this diversity from devolving into chaos and disintegration. The
author concludes that translation-generated lexical diversity could be
accepted as part of a more pluralistic view of EU law creation and reception. 

Chapter 12 “Specificities of Translation at the European Court of Human
Rights: Policy and Practice” by James Brannan provides an overview of the
challenges deriving from the broad territorial jurisdiction of the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the interfaces between its two official
languages (English and French) and non-official languages. Among other
aspects, he points to the translator’s search for balance between consistency
and idiomaticity, as well as to the relevance of internal cooperation with
lawyers and judges. While only a small minority of judgements and decisions
are actually available in both official languages, those selected for
translation constitute leading case-law, often on particularly sensitive or
new issues. The translator has particular responsibility in Grand Chamber
cases where both language versions are considered to be authentic. The Court’s
translators must bear in mind that their translations will be read and
interpreted by domestic courts and lawyers across Europe and may in turn be
translated into other languages. Ultimately, the relevant Convention standards
will have to be ‘translated’ into reality in the legal order of each country;
the clarity, accuracy, and terminological consistency of the official language
case-law are therefore all the more important. 

Chapter 13: “Comparative Interpretation of Multilingual Law in International
Courts: Patterns and Implications for Translation” by Fernando Prieto Ramos
and Lucie Pacho Aljanati addresses the implications of equal authenticity in
multilingual law interpretation and translation. Patterns of explicit
comparative interpretation are measured in the case-law of the International
Court of Justice (ICJ), the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body (AB),
and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The corpus is composed
of all case-law involving multilingual interpretation from the establishment
of each organization to 15 July 2016.  Patterns of comparative interpretation
are discussed in connection with their legal framework, the complexity of the
relevant language regimes and other factors quantified in order to nuance our
understanding of the differences found in comparative hermeneutic practices:
the nature of proceedings, the initiators and motivation of comparison
(including cases of divergence between language versions) and systemic factors
such as case-load and political considerations. The implications for
translators and institutions involved in producing and uniformly interpreting
multilingual law are also raised. 

EVALUATION

As the first book 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 book 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.

The volume is very coherent and its closely related chapters and perspectives
offer a unique snapshot of the dynamic institutional translation landscape,
with a clear focus on ensuring quality in specialized communication. The book
also illustrates the increasing cooperation among institutional and academic
actors, and the synergies that can emerge when they exchange approaches,
experiences, and methods. 
The editors have met the aims of this edited volume, as it both provides an
extensive overview of previous work and expands the field in new directions
which will hopefully inspire future research.

The book will be of interest both to legal translators, lawyers, and anyone
interested in institutional legal translation.

REFERENCES

Cao, Deborah. 2007. Translating Law. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lelija Socanac is Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb. She
is the head of the Centre for Language and Law and the Foreign Language
Department. Her research interests include multilingualism, contact<br
/>linguistics, (historical) sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis and
legal linguistics.





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