Quality aspects in institutional translation

Tomáš Svoboda; Łucja Biel; Krzysztof Łoboda; Sonia Vandepitte; Fernando Prieto Ramos; Karolina Stefaniak; Ingemar Strandvik; Jan Hanzl; John Beaven; Dariusz Koźbiał

Quality aspects in institutional translation

Authors

Tomáš Svoboda (ed)

Łucja Biel (ed)

Krzysztof Łoboda (ed)

Synopsis

The purpose of this volume is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretical background for discussing quality on the one hand, and chapters exploring selected aspects of quality and case studies from both academics and practitioners on the other. Our aim is to present these two approaches as a breeding ground for testing one vis-à-vis the other.

This book studies institutional translation mostly through the lens of the European Union (EU) reality, and, more specifically, of EU institutions and bodies, due to the unprecedented scale of their multilingual operations and the legal and political importance of translation. Thus, it is concerned with the supranational (international) level, deliberately leaving national and other contexts aside. Quality in supranational institutions is explored both in terms of translation processes and their products – the translated texts.

Chapters

Quality aspects in institutional translation
Introduction

Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel, Krzysztof Łoboda

Chapter 1
Translation product quality
A conceptual analysis

Sonia Vandepitte

Chapter 2
Quality in institutional EU translation
Parameters, policies and practices

Łucja Biel

Chapter 3
The evolving role of institutional translation service managers in quality assurance
Profiles and challenges

Fernando Prieto Ramos

Chapter 4
Translation manuals and style guides as quality assurance indicators
The case of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation

Tomáš Svoboda

Chapter 5
Terminology work in the European Commission
Ensuring high-quality translation in a multilingual environment

Karolina Stefaniak

Chapter 6
Evaluation of outsourced translations
State of play in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT)

Ingemar Strandvik

Chapter 7
Quality assurance at the Council of the EU’s translation service

Jan Hanzl, John Beaven

Chapter 8
A two-tiered approach to quality assurance in legal translation at the Court of Justice of the European Union

Dariusz Koźbiał

Chapter 9

Author Biographies

Tomáš Svoboda

Tomáš Svoboda is Head of German Department in the Institute of Translation Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, from which he graduated in English and German translation. He earned his Ph.D. in Translation Studies in 2004. From 2004 to 2007 Tomáš Svoboda worked as an in-house translator and training coordinator for the Czech Language Department of the Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, Luxembourg, and subsequently for four years as a contractor for the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. He lectures on technical and institutional translation, tools and technologies, and translation history in the Institute of Translation Studies. He is an active translator and auditor under the ISO 17100 standard. His publications cover translation quality, institutional and technical translation, translation technology, future of the translation profession as well as translation history. Tomáš is member of the Executive Board of the Czech Union of Translators and Interpreters, a coordinator of FIT Europe (Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs) Technology Group, and Board Member of the European Masters in Translation (EMT) network.

Łucja Biel

Łucja Biel is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches and researches legal translation. She is Secretary General of the European Society of Translation Studies (EST) and a deputy editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation. She was a Visiting Lecturer on the MA in Legal Translation at City University London from 2009 to 2014. She holds an MA in Translation Studies (Jagiellonian University of Kraków), PhD in Linguistics (University of Gdańsk), and Diploma in English and EU Law (University of Cambridge) and a School of American Law diploma (Chicago-Kent School of Law and University of Gdańsk). She has participated in a number of internationally and nationally funded research projects and has published widely in the area of EU/legal translation, translator training and corpus linguistics, including a book Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law (Peter Lang, 2014).

Krzysztof Łoboda

Krzysztof Łoboda is a translator trainer and researcher at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he earned an MA in Translation Studies to further continue PhD studies in linguistics. He has also completed postgraduate studies in Research Project Management and other courses such as Term Extraction and Management at Imperial College London. He is a member of the PKN Technical Committee 256 on Terminology, Other Language Resources and Content Management. Since 2004 Krzysztof has been an external translator/reviser of documents issued by EU institutions (mostly EC, but also EP, CoR and EESC). His research interests include translation technology, specialized translation, and e-learning in translator training. He is currently involved in developing TRALICE consortium of translation professionals and researchers, a regional platform to facilitate cooperation between business and academia.