Abstract
Translation quality and translation quality management are key concerns for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), and the European Union institutions more broadly. Translated texts are often legally binding, politically sensitive, confidential or important for the image of the institutions. For legislative texts, an important principle of EU law is that there is no ‘original’: all language versions are equivalent and equally authentic. Consistency in translation strategies and in the approach to quality is therefore critical.
In this contribution, we first outline the context in which translation takes place in the EU institutions, focusing on challenges for quality. We illustrate how translation quality is managed in practice, identifying two guiding principles: consistency of approach, and consistency of quality. We explain how DGT’s quality management policy defines quality and how it should be managed, then demonstrate why achieving ‘equivalent’ quality across all language versions, translators, and institutions is hard. We examine how translated texts are dealt with in the attempt to achieve this goal. Last, we widen the focus to consider what these challenges and the EU approach mean for translators and their status and agency. Issues of translation quality are also issues of ethics, power relations and professional values.
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and should not be considered to represent the European Commission’s official position.
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- 1.
In this contribution, we use ‘quality management’ to refer to the totality of policies, methods, processes and procedures designed and implemented to achieve the product and service quality objectives set. ‘Quality assurance’, which is part of quality management, refers, in a wide sense, to operations taking place before, during and after translation (and involving both source and target texts) to ensure the desired quality of the product. We use the term ‘quality assurance’ in full to avoid possible confusion with ‘quality assessment’, as both may be abbreviated to QA in the literature.
- 2.
Methods and procedures used to judge whether, and to what extent, a translation product meets the established quality requirements. In the EU context, quality assessment is mostly, but not exclusively, performed on outsourced translations.
- 3.
The DGT definition of ‘quality control’ (QC) is “making sure that a translation complies with the required quality standards for the intended use and the text type concerned”. QC relies on revision (systematic comparison of the original and the translation) and review (target-text-focused checking of the translation to ensure its suitability for the agreed purpose); see DGT’s tender specifications for the OMNIBUS-15 outsourcing call for tender, Sect. 5.1 below; see also the ISO 17100:2015 standard – Requirements for translation services).
- 4.
In the DGT Quality Management Framework, ‘quality’ is defined, drawing on ISO standards for quality management, as “the degree to which a set of characteristics fulfils stated or implied needs or expectations”. Hence, DGT’s notion of quality is customer-focused. Defined in this way, translation quality is never absolute but depends on both context and situation. It is the sum of various quality aspects that may need to be prioritised and it concerns both products and services, as well the processes involved.
- 5.
See Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social committee and the Committee of the Regions – A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism. COM(2005) 596 final. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1512987626500&uri=CELEX:52005DC0596
- 6.
This is the main decision-making procedure used for adopting EU legislation. It mainly involves the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. For a more detailed illustration of the procedure, see e.g. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/external/html/legislativeprocedure/default_en.htm
- 7.
Theoretically, as far as the EU’s official languages are concerned, there are 552 (i.e. 24 × 23) potential language pairs to deal with. In practice, the number of language combinations is considerably smaller, as English is now the overwhelmingly dominant source-language: In the Commission, in 2016, more than 80% of all documents were translated from English.
Translation agencies on the market also deal with high numbers of language pairs, of course, but their dependence on client demand and market developments leads to significant fluctuations, with agencies regularly obliged to source new suppliers for previously unheard-of languages at very short notice.
- 8.
In the EU institutions, the legal services constitute independent organisational entities, separate from the translation and other services. One of the principal tasks of an EU lawyer-linguist is to ensure that all EU legislation has the same legal meaning in every official language. Lawyer-linguists must therefore be able to discern precisely the intention of EU legislation and make sure that this intention is accurately conveyed in their native language. A degree in law is a pre-requisite for the job. In addition, sound linguistic abilities and experience in drafting or translating, checking or revising legal texts are emphasised as professional skills, but no formal degree in languages, linguistics or translation is required (Correia 2003; Strandvik 2014a). However, today this description applies particularly to the European Parliament and Council lawyer-linguists. The role of the Commission’s lawyer-linguists, now called legal revisers, has changed over the years. While still doing some translation revision, mostly of translations of the Commission’s autonomous acts, they now concentrate mainly on the legislative quality of the original documents, and much less on the quality of translations. As for the European Court of Justice, the translators, who are all lawyers, are titled lawyer-linguists.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
See DGT’s organisation chart at https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/translation_en
- 13.
‘Ex-post quality analysis’ refers to post-production analyses of translations after they have left DGT. Typically, a sample of translations is collected, and a certain number of pages are analysed to examine various aspects of quality. Different quality aspects may be focused on from one analysis to another.
- 14.
A corrigendum is a formal document (a list of errors and their corrections), used to correct a legal act or other official document or their translations, when the errors detected do not affect the essential substance of the adopted act or document (in other words when they are non-substantive, e.g. because they are obvious). When the errors detected do affect the substance of an act (i.e. are substantive), a correcting act must usually be drafted. In such cases, an adoption procedure similar to that applied when the act was initially adopted must be followed.
- 15.
DGT’s outsourcing is based on multiannual framework contracts concluded with external contractors. The contracts result from a tendering procedure in which a set of tender specifications defined by DGT are applied. In the tendering process, aspiring contractors’ offers are assessed as a function of the quality of the service proposed and the price quoted, with a weighting of 70% for quality and 30% for price.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
In DGT terms, this would mean translation supplier management, translation/translation service design, and translation process management.
- 19.
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Drugan, J., Strandvik, I., Vuorinen, E. (2018). Translation Quality, Quality Management and Agency: Principles and Practice in the European Union Institutions. In: Moorkens, J., Castilho, S., Gaspari, F., Doherty, S. (eds) Translation Quality Assessment. Machine Translation: Technologies and Applications, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91241-7_3
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