Institutional translation

Institutional translation is carried out in and for administrative entities, whether national or international, within the translation services. These are sometimes staffed by civil servants and sometimes by personnel with other types of employment relationship with the Administration.

The concept defines a professional context much more than a type of translation, since an institutional translator may have to deal with texts of a very diverse nature, ranging from legal texts (to a very large extent) to those of other specialised fields (medicine, IT, agriculture, to name but a few).

In this context, the translator will have to work essentially in an anonymous way and as part of a team, respecting as much as possible the linguistic, lexical and formal conventions specific to the texts of the organization in question, whether national or international (this is probably where the bulk of what we call institutional translation takes place). All these conventions, in fact, lend coherence to the body of texts that the translator contributes to create through his or her work. These texts are often recurrent, or amended, so the translator must pay the utmost attention to the previously translated background texts, and this is a huge determining factor in his or her job.