Institutional translation for international organizations: a close look at terminological challenges

Abstract

In the present circumstances, in which international relations are fundamental in the mediation and solution of global conflicts, multilingualism has become essential both for internal and external communication. This has increased dramatically the demand for fight-quality translations. This dissertation will mainly focus on the translation for different international organizations, or the so-called institutional translation. The translation of documents of a legal nature has become one of the most recurrent fields of institutions and this works aims to explore the translation policies and practices adopted in different international organizations. The first part of this dissertation will consist in a description of the institutional context, translation procedures, protocols and methodologies. The main goal is to analyse how translation operates within different organizations taking into account the fact that non-governmental organizations’ lack of infrastructure usually leads to volunteer practices. The second part will deal with phraseology and terminology management in institutional translations from English into Spanish (and viceversa). An identification of the characteristic expressions employed in these institutions will be carried out to analyse how they are treated to ensure reliability and quality to the translations. To do so, a Spanish-English parallel corpus with source texts and translations taken from different international intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations will be collected. A concordance program such AntConc or similar, will be used in search for frequent terms and frequent combinations of words to see how they are being delt with in the translated versions. The main purpose is to explore the adopted approaches and to compare and compile a list of equivalences of the most common correspondences that can be useful for translators in the institutional context.