Translating Official Documents

Roberto Mayoral Asensio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138130876
• eBook ISBN: 9781317641766
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Official translations are generally documents that serve as legally valid instruments. They include anything from certificates of birth, death or marriage through to academic transcripts or legal contracts. This field of translation is now as important as it is fraught with difficulties, for it is only in a few areas that the cultural differences are so acute and the consequences of failure so palpable. In a globalizing world, our official institutions increasingly depend on translations of official documents, but little has been done to elaborate the skills and dilemmas involved.

Roberto Mayoral deals with the very practical problems of official translating. He points out the failings of traditional theories in this field and the need for revised concepts such as the virtual document, pragmatic constraints, and risk analysis. He details aspects of the social contexts, ethical norms, translation strategies, different formats, fees, legal formulas, and ways of solving the most frequent problems. Care is taken to address as wide a range of cultural contexts as possible and to stress the active role of the translator.

This book is intended as a teaching text for the classroom, for self-learning, or for professionals who want to reflect on their practice. Activities and exercises are suggested for each chapter, and information is included on professional associations and societies across the globe.

1. Introduction

This book is about official written translation and official translators in the world. Official translations may be broadly defined as translations that meet the requirements to serve as legally valid instruments in a target country. This kind of translation is of growing importance in the increasingly smaller world we live in. It arouses interest in students, scholars, trainers and practitioners. Given the absence of any comprehensive monograph on this subject, our study is more than justified.

However, our task is not easy. Official translation takes on extremely varied forms throughout the world, and discussing the practice of translation is always difficult when you must exclude references to a specific pair of languages in order to reach a wider audience. In order to overcome this problem, English will be the source text in our examples and, for the target language, I will give an English version of what would have been my translation. Since translation procedures are simply expression procedures, my point is that the transition from the source to the target can be explained through intralinguistic operations. Hopefully, re-expression in the same language may be an accurate enough representation of many of the translation procedures that occur between two different languages.

When considering the social context of this kind of translation, I will make frequent references to the Spanish situation. My intention is to use them as an example, not to present the Spanish situation as ideal or unique.

The discussion of official translation in this work is meant to portray only its practice and not theoretical considerations. This has proved an impossible task; even when priority has been given to introducing the reader to practice, generalizations about practice always lead us to theoretical considerations. Teaching practice consists not only of explaining how to translate a text; it necessarily implies endowing future translators with critical tools that will allow them to make their own choices consciously and creatively.

Official translation is not a well-defined activity. It overlaps with fields such as oral translation, legal translation, court translating and interpreting, and community interpreting. Nevertheless, I have tried to restrict the description to the most common types of translation tasks we may find.

Official translation is often considered an activity subject to numerous strict norms, or as an extremely constrained form of translation. However, this is not always the case. Firstly, there are many different kinds of norms, and their degree of obligation varies from legal norms to uses and customs. Secondly, the number of compulsory norms in our field is usually extremely low. Thirdly, transgression of the norms is inherent to the practice of any kind of translation, as this is the only way to develop new techniques and reach higher standards of quality. Lastly, even the most constrained ways of translating admit a high degree of freedom and creativity, which allows translators to find their job extremely enjoyable.

Work as an official translator makes you feel socially useful, even powerful; it gives you a prominence that other kinds of translation do not. Official translation is also one of the most personalized types of translation. It lets you meet your client and the recipient of your work. Official translation is strongly linked to ethical considerations. Being an official translator brings to life the idea of being a bridge between cultures, for which the client’s trust is an indispensable condition. Official translation also allows high doses of creativity. It is a prestigious profession and a very old activity: official translation in Spain has been documented as far back as the ninth century; the first reference to ‘sworn translation’ was in 1551 (Feria 2002a).

Welcome to a whole new world.

2. Professional Practice

In Spain, the official written translating of documents is called sworn translation and is carried out by professionals called sworn translators. But official documents are also rendered by translators who are non-professional or have not achieved sworn translator status. We will thus call the translating of these documents official translation, rather than sworn translation. When we refer to translators who perform official translation, we will call them official translators, whatever their professional condition may be.

Documents may be translated for different purposes. They may be intended for the government of a country or community speaking a foreign language, often in order to certify allegations in a legal or administrative process and usually as evidence in a court case. They may be translated so that a legal situation originating in a foreign language country can be recognized, or in order to apply for the recognition or validation of merits acquired in a foreign country. Legal texts can also be translated in order to apply the source norm to foreign citizens, which is a basic principle of Private International Law. For instance, a Moroccan citizen living in Spain can require their divorce demand to follow Moroccan law; in that case, the Spanish judge and lawyers may need a translation of the corresponding law, jurisprudence and doctrine plus the official translator’s expert commentary.

Since official translations must include a statement that certifies fidelity to the source text, the translator becomes a public authenticator of the contents of the translation. In order to acquire the status of an authenticator, a translator must sit an exam set by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Translators with a university degree in translation and interpreting must have met certain requirements in order to receive the appointment without taking the exam. These conditions are specific to Spain and situations vary enormously all around the world, as we will discuss later.

Documents for official translation may contain any of the following elements:

❑ Recorded elements: births, marriages, academic studies, deaths, wills, illegal activities, or other legal or administrative acts (such as sales agreements or medical prescriptions)

❑ Documentary elements, such as letters, reports, blank certification forms, completed certification forms, validated certifications, translations, authorized translations and authorized and validated translations

❑ Validating elements, such as the certification of formalities corresponding to different moments of a proceeding (the certifications of a registrar, a notary public, a court clerk, the Hague apostille, for example)

The purpose of the translation – the Skopos named by the functionalist school (cf. Nord 1997) – would seem to be enviably well defined for official translation if compared to other translation situations. It should be fairly easy for the translator to find the adequate way to perform their communicative act, remaining faithful to the original text and loyal to the demands of the final receiver.

The official translator’s profile would also seem well defined. The translato r is a person who complies with the requirements established by local legislation (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Spain, although there are no requirements in countries such as Ireland). They should be competent in the fields of economic and legal translation, and they must consciously assume responsibility for all the consequences and liabilities of their function as public authenticator.

The receiver’s profile is perfectly defined as well: it is the courts or other branches of the public administration, usually under the ministries of education, the interior (police), foreign affairs, and so on who receive the translation.

The texts to be translated are documents that must function in a linguistic and cultural community different to the one in which they originated. If we are to follow the lead of the examinations for joining the profession or the requirements, these texts are in the economic and legal fields. But the slightest incursion into professional practice shows that any text is liable to be the object of official translation if it falls within a judicial process or a request of acknowledgement of rights before any kind of administrative body (see Section 4.1, Types).

The language from which one translates is the one that the official translator is entitled to work from. Later we will discuss the way in which a narrow application of this principle would render certain documents impossible to translate.

2.1 Professional practice around the world

If we search for a ‘norm’ describing the way official translation is conducted around the world, we will not find it; the reality is too rich and varied. The models or prototypes that we come across are diverse and do not fit exactly in any scheme. There are countries with absolute regulation of both the activity and professional practice (Argentina); countries where entry to the profession is regulated but not the practice itself (Spain); and others where neither of them is regulated (Cuba, Russia). In some countries only the practice in the courts is regulated (Italy); in others the activity is regulated both within and outside of the courts (Denmark). Sometimes written translation functions almost as an appendix to oral translation (United States); elsewhere written translation is given at least the same importance (Spain). In some countries, translating into a non-mother tongue is considered improper practice (United Kingdom); in others (Spain, Italy), working in both directions is accepted (from and into the translator’s mother tongue). There may be mandatory membership of an association (we will call them professional societies) (Argentina); there may be only non-official voluntary membership of what we will call professional associations, especially created for official translators (Catalonia¹); or there may be no special association at all beyond a general professional one for all kinds of translators (although France, for example, has two associations: one for literary, the other for the rest). Translators for the courts are sometimes considered a type of judicial expert, as is the case in Mexico and France, but this is far from the case els...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Professional Practice
• 3. The Social Context
• 4. Documents
• 5. The Official Translator as Jurilinguistic Expert
• 6. Different Ways of Translating
• 7. Common Problems and Frequent Solutions
• 8. On the Translation of Different Documents
• 9. Sources of Information
• 10. Other Professional Aspects
• References and Further Reading
• Addresses
• Appendix
• Index