Poirier, Éric and Gallego-Hernández, Daniel, eds. (2018): Business and Institutional Translation: New Insights and Reflections. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 240 p.

The dynamic field of business and institutional translation has not been given as much attention by academics in translation studies compared to its technical, medical or literary counterparts. However, there is a recent trend in publications and events that focuses on this specialization. In line with this interest, this book has two specific aims as the editors specify in their introduction: to enhance efforts to recognize the importance of the field and to keep academics and practitioners abreast of innovations and reflections in this respect. In the initial section on institutional translation, the first chapter brings to light the importance of multilingual or bilingual websites for universities and the challenges that these websites pose at the macro-level (what should be translated, division of tasks among translators and revisors, cooperation with technical staff and directionality) and at the micro-level (terminological and stylistic issues). The chapter offers some solutions to these problems based on the authors’ experience translating the website of a Turkish university. The second chapter is an inquiry into quality assurance processes in governmental institutions in seven countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy and Poland). The aim was to compare their use of translation technology, translation manuals or style guides with their quality management strategy through an international survey that was conducted in the different institutions. The results reveal a diverse landscape of practices in translation in this area. The third chapter of this section defends the urgent need to standardize terminologies and translations within and between South Korean government institutions. To this end, the author compiles a Korean-English parallel corpus to analyze and compare terminologies in three South Korean government institutions. The results show clear inconsistencies which resulted in discrepancies in translation. The author thus makes a case for more careful, corpus-based research on the issue of standardization. The final chapter of this section on institutional translation highlights the need to implement rigorous standards for the professionalization of translation in the Arab world with a focus on the important role that the academic context of this field plays in this sense. The second section on business, finance and accounting opens with a chapter that deals with the terminology of real estate purchase agreements, which are considered hybrid texts and thus will contain terms from secondary fields of specialization. The methodology is based on a parallel corpus. The author analyzes the level of specialization of the terms and the different translation techniques applied to transfer their meaning from English into Spanish. The second chapter of this section supplements the preceding argumentation surrounding the use of a corpus methodology to study the terminology of a given area, in this case consolidated financial statements in French. The corpus consists of consolidated statements of profits or losses from companies in French-speaking countries (Belgium, Canada, France, Morocco and Switzerland). The chapter describes the terminology used by listed companies in these countries and specifically analyzes to what extent the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have been implemented on a linguistic level. It is worth noting that the chapter’s results reveal a high degree of variation in the terminology used rather than the harmonization one would expect if the IFRS were applied. The third chapter discusses the adoption of a conceptual perspective with the graphic representation of notions to properly understand financial concepts, also in relation with the IFRS, but in this case the language combination is Italian-French. The fourth chapter reviews localization of two m-commerce applications into the Arabic language to respond to new conceptual needs. The fifth chapter provides a reflection on the metaphorical process in the language …