Two-tiered approach to quality assurance in legal translation at the Court of Justice of the European Union

The objective of this chapter is to identify the key aspects of Quality Assurance (QA) affecting the quality of translations at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The chapter starts with a brief clarification of the terms connected with QA, which are quite often used interchangeably and imprecisely. The next two sections set the background for the analysis by exploring the current language arrangements at the CJEU and associated challenges and by discussing two standards that are relevant to the field of legal translation, namely EN-15038: 2006 and ISO
17100. The main part of the chapter proposes a two-tiered approach to translation
quality at the CJEU. It is argued that it can be conceptualized at two interrelated levels, namely the human resources level and workflow level. While the human resources level comprises, inter alia, in-house lawyer-linguists, external contractors, revisers, auxiliary staff and project managers, the workflow level consists of measures aimed at achieving proper structurization of the translation process as well as intra- and interinstitutional co-operation.