Prieto Ramos, Fernando, ed. (2018): Institutional Translation for International Governance. Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 228 p.

Institutional translation has been garnering much interest in the field of translation studies, considering the increasing number of publications since the 1970s, though most of the research is carried out within national settings (Covacs 1979). In fact, translation studies in intergovernmental organizations remain limited and, in this regard, the book under review contributes to fill this gap.

Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, a leading scholar in the field of legal translation and international organizations, the book includes papers by a selection of guest authors as well as outputs from a Consolidator Grant project led by the editor. It consists of 13 interrelated chapters divided into three parts.

Part 1, entitled Contemporary Issues and Methods assembles three chapters. In the first one, Susan Šarčević (p. 9-24) focuses on the challenges that institutional translators face and their role as transnational multilingual communicators. The author takes examples from the multilingual text production in the European Commission to highlight the main task of translators, which is: “to preserve the unity of the single instrument with the ultimate aim of promoting its uniform interpretation and application in practice” (p. 13). We can thus say that the challenge of the translator of legal texts in institutional settings is to ensure consistency in terminology, i.e. internal harmonization of multilingual texts: “the greatest challenge to institutional legal translators is learning to go beyond surface-level similarity” (p. 23).

To overcome the above-stated challenge, the translator must have interdisciplinary skills and the mastery of the subject matter. In that regard, Šarčević encourages translation schools all over the world to provide necessary interdisciplinary training so that translators are equipped with the skills that enable them to become transnational communicators and bring quality to institutional multilingualism.

In the same regard, the second chapter (p. 25-36), authored by Łucja Biel, investigates corpora in institutional legal translation. She highlights the evolution and importance of using corpus and technological tools in legal translation both for the practitioners and scholars in generating resourceful terminological data. For practitioners, “corpus tool can improve the efficiency of the translation process thanks to fast information retrieval, precision of searches and contextualization of information with usage preferences” (p. 34).

Nonetheless, the author deplores the slow uptake of corpus tools by practicing translators as illustrated in the different surveys she presents. The chapter equally highlights some of the new corpus tools to be used by legal translators (especially JodGENTT and TermWise) which have already been tested and proven to be efficient tools.

The last chapter of this first part of the book focuses on comparative law and legal translation. The author, Jan Engberg, considers the two disciplines are complementary to each other when it comes to transferring knowledge. Based on frame semantics as an analytical framework, this last chapter describes and evaluates the terminological decisions the translator has to make when dealing with legal translation.

The second part of the book, entitled Translation Quality Assessment in Law-and Policy-making and Implementation, also the longest part –and the core- of the book, is divided into six chapters, all dealing with translation quality as explicitly stated in the title.

In the first chapter of this second part, Ingemar Strandvik takes a ‘journey’ into the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. As an insider and quality manager of this institution, the seasoned legal translator calls for a ‘more structured approach to quality assurance’ such that the EU “speaks with one consistent institutional voice in each of the EU’s official languages” (p. 51). In a ‘six-stop’ journey, the author maps out a thorough landscape of the institution, its mission as concerns translation (in-house and outsourcing) strategies of quality assessment in relation to the ever fast-growing of technology and machine translation, and the challenges that an institution like the European Commission faces.

After many questions raised with some proposed answers, Strandvik comes to the conclusion that “the translation industry and the translation profession at large are confronted with the same challenges, useful insights can be provided by the international standards on translation service provision” (p. 61-62).

For quality assessment to be more efficient in institutional translation, Anne Lafeber examines the skills of translators and revisers at the EU and the United Nations (UN) in chapter 5. In a questionnaire-driven survey, she identifies the various skills that are required of new recruits. She comes to conclude that “skills required for achieving quality are more than just language skills; they include analytical and research skills, as well as procedural knowledge” (p. 79).

In chapter 6, Prieto Ramos and Diego Guzmán Bourdelle-Casals advocate legal terminology consistency and adequacy to be quality indicators of institutional translation. Their comparative method of analysis focuses on translation patterns into Spanish over a period of fifteen years (2000-2015) within the framework of the LETRINT project. Using a corpus-based, holistic analysis (combination of lexicometric, that is quantitative and qualitative methods), the authors examine how the term due process is translated into Spanish within the aforementioned interval of time. The findings of the analysis reveal that the use of a mixed-method corpus-based research can be useful in highlighting textual patterns and skills in an international organization like the EU and the UN.

Agnieszka Doczekalaska explores multilingual practices by comparing the EU and the Canadian legal systems through a comparative analysis in chapter 7. She focuses on the similarities and differences of legislative multilingualism and drafting processes in Canada and the EU in terms of terminological choices.

Chapter 8 is authored by Colin Robertson, whose main interest is in legal-linguistic profiling as a translation aid. He aims to provide a “method for analysing multilingual and multicultural legal environments in which a text to be translated forms part” (p. 113). As most of the previous contributors to the book, Robertson delves into one of the numerous EU agencies, namely the European Aviation Safety Agency, to carry out his research.

The second part closes out with chapter 9, authored by Mathilde Fontanet. The author discusses the translation of hybrid legal texts within the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) where she worked for more than two decades before switching to academics. After a presentation of some taxonomic considerations on specialized and legal discourse, Fontanet uses parallel corpora made of hybrid legal-technical texts (agreements, safety rules and contracts adjudication proposals) she compiled from the CERN. According to the author, the results of analysis of these texts reveal two possible situations: either one domain prevails, or both cohabit. She therefore concluded that “translators should ensure that there is absolute consistency between sub-technical vocabulary and terminology” (p. 138).

The third and last part of the book entitled Translation and Multilingual Case Law, brings together three chapters dealing with several international and European courts, including the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

In chapter 10, Susan Wright presents the multilingual system in which the EU judiciary functions and the impact that this multilingual system has on the judgements rendered. In keeping with the same judiciary system within the EU, Aleksandar Trklja investigates a corpus of translation-generated diversity in chapter 11. He operates under the assumption that “although EU law exists in different linguistic versions because of the ‘meta principle’ of uniformity (…), it is considered that all these linguistic versions have the same meaning” (p. 156). Therefore, according to Trklja, quality translation in the CJEU has been achieved. The above analysis is based on all the decisions of the Court published in the following three languages until 2011: French, English and German. The results of analysis bring about several important proposals.

In chapter 12, James Brannan is interested in the different characteristics of translation within the ECHR. He specifically examines the balance between the Court’s policy and practice and shows that such policies have advantages and difficulties due to having only two official languages (English and French).

The 13^th and last chapter is written by Prieto Ramos and Lucie Pacho Aljanti, and in this chapter, the two scholars examine the interpretation of multilingual law in international courts in a comparative view, and its patterns and implications for translation. They start with the assumption that “the existence of authentic texts in two or more languages can either complicate or facilitate the interpretation of a multilingual instrument” (p. 181). It comes from the comparative analysis that law interpretation problems cannot be totally solved in a multilingual context of text production but translation can reduce divergences between different language versions “by ensuring accuracy and inter-linguistic concordance in the processes of multilingual text production” (p. 201).

The well-crafted structure and the variety of institutional translation aspects discussed in the book make it worth reading for scholars and professionals who are interested in how translation is carried out in the supranational institutions. To sum up, the book definitely discusses key issues on quality institutional translation also developed in a collective book entitled Quality Aspects in Institutional Translation edited by Svoboda, Biel, and Łoboda (2017) from the same period, and the two constitute major contributions to terminology and quality assessment as far as multilingualism and translation are concerned in leading international organizations like the EU and its various bodies.