Evaluation of outsourced translations. State of play in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT)

The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing.  This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-for-purpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and questions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text categories and the risks involved.  In the implementation of the guidelines, there has been a perceived tension between the fitness-for-purpose concept and high quality, on the one hand, and between the fitness-for-purpose concept and the traditional fidelity paradigm, on the other. The paper analyses why this tension is only apparent and why the fitness-for-purpose concept better than the traditional fidelity concept caters for the needs of the institutional translation and multilingual law-making that takes place in the European context.