Earlier this month I went to a conference on legal translation in Lisbon, held at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. I hadn’t been to a Tradulinguas conference before, and knew nothing about the company, so admit to being a little apprehensive about taking a leap into the relative unknown. What swayed me was that it offered a great opportunity to spend a few days brushing up on my Portuguese in Lisbon, as well as a chance to meet up with other translators specialising in law, including several I knew already.

The conference’s focus was very much international, with sessions delivered in English, Portuguese or French. The speakers were not afraid to be controversial and stimulate debate about legal translation at the coalface, including the background, skills, depth of knowledge, research methodology and/or qualifications a translator specialising in this area ’should’ have. A key theme was the role of comparative law, since countries’ legal systems are rarely directly comparable, even if they follow the same legal tradition and use the same language.

I was both surprised and impressed at the strength of opinion expressed in the sessions. It was great to see so many attendees speak up, giving the sessions a lovely interactive feel. But I do wish that the sessions had kept more to a traditional ‘answers at the end’ format, as some speakers weren’t able to finish their presentations due to the sheer number of questions from the audience while they were in full flow.

Highlights of the conference for me were:

- Ingemar Strandvick’s and Professor Klaus-Dieter Borchardt’s opening sessions on multilingual law-making and legal translation in the European Union and Community Law. Professor Borchardt’s publication ‘The ABC of European Union law’ is available from the Publications Office of the European Union.

- Dr Pommer’s session on comparative law and its quest for a legal ‘meta language’ to facilitate international cooperation and harmonisation: is law a global discourse?  Comparability vs. translatability: does translation always have to mean equivalence?

- Ana Soares’s presentation (in Portuguese) on the Portuguese legal system compared with the legal system of England and Wales.

- Juliette Scott’s session on DIY corpora in legal translation – her ‘NIFTY’ approach.

- Véronique Sauron’s session on online resources for legal translators, and mostly importantly how to use them quickly and effectively, identifying reliable sources.

- Filipe Carrera’s interactive session on networking and what it really means. Filipe is clearly a highly experienced speaker and his session got the message across without being cheesy.

Oh, and the weather was fabulous! More information on the conference, including speaker bios and abstracts can be found here: http://www.tradulinguas.com/conf-juridica/

Image courtesy of World Travel Guide 2010ikoniхудожник на икониИкони на светци

Those of you who last month read about the reported short of decent English translators for the EU may be interested to listen to this interview on Radio 4’s PM programme aired yesterday. Quite a lot of airtime was dedicated to the subject on the programme, with some interesting points raised. You can listen again by selecting the relevant option on the website.

Brussels rules state that translators into English should have the language as their mother tongue. British standards are so poor, though, that the EU has taken emergency measures.

Potential recruits are being given remedial coaching to bring their abilities up to standard, while a Eurocrat has been dispatched to scour Britain full-time for anyone who can speak foreign languages well, and to encourage schoolchildren to study them.

The article appears to apportion some of the blame to the decreasing number of children studying languages at GCSE level. I wrote a post in June about a petition to the Prime Minister to save foreign language provision in UK secondary schools, but I would be surprised if the Government’s relatively recent (2004) decision to remove languages from the list of compulsory subjects at GCSE was having such a rapid effect.

I also think there must be more than meets the eye to this story; I can only surmise about the reasons for this seemingly dire situation, but perhaps the EU needs to target its recruitment campaigns at more highly qualified linguists in the UK. The prospect of working as a translator at the EU is a very much sought after ideal for modern language undergraduates who as yet may have little other knowledge about translation as a profession. I must say that whilst I was an undergraduate I had to do a great deal of individual research into what being a professional translator was really like. Many a day was spent in the Cardiff University careers centre reading up on translation as a career, but it wasn’t until I was halfway through my MA in Translation at Westminster University that I began to fully understand what my chosen career would involve, and that it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve moving to Brussels. The public perception of translation as a career is still largely that of a career in the EU after a short spell studying for a BA in languages, but this is a very narrow impression of the profession indeed.

Consequently, perhaps a large number of the applications are from enthusiastic but fundamentally untrained graduates who hanker after the ‘glamour’ of working at the EU, perhaps not fully appreciating the level of skill and precision required by the entrance tests. Moreover, I have never noticed a requirement in the EU recruitment campaign for any form of specific training in the field of translation (for example postgraduate studies such as the Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation), and it is widely accepted these days that, unless they already have industry experience, most new entrants to the profession will need to undertake this type of training in order to reach an adequate standard.

The EU recruitment campaigns are also usually quite low-key in this country. If they want to target a different class of translator then perhaps they need to create more of a fanfare about their recruitment campaign, whilst also focussing on the professional associations such as the ITI and the universities that train translators to a professional level.