Pietro Ramos, Fernando (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, especially given the increasing number of publications since the 1970s, despite most research being 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 filling this gap. Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, a leading scholar in the field of legal translation and international organizations, this book gathers the findings of a project funded by the European Research Council under the coordination of the editor. It consists of 13 interrelated chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, entitled Contemporary Issues and Methods contains three chapters. In the first chapter, Susan Šarčević (p. 9-24) focusses on the challenges that the institutional translators face and their role as transnational multilingual communicators. The author takes examples from the production of multilingual texts within 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 translators of legal texts face 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 mastery of the subject matter. In this regard, Šarčević encourages translation schools all over the world to provide the necessary interdisciplinary training so that translators are equipped with the necessary skills to 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, for both practitioners and scholars, to generate 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 that can be used by legal translators (especially JodGENTT, TermWise) and whose efficiency has already been tested and proven. The last chapter in the first part of the book focuses on comparative law and legal translation. The author Jan Engberg considers the two disciplines to be complimentary when it comes to transferring knowledge. Based on frame semantics as an analytical framework, this last chapter attempts to describe and evaluate 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, which is the longest part – and actually 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 Strandvic takes a ‘journey’ into the Directorate General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. As an insider and quality manager in this institution, the seasoned legal translator calls for a “more structured approach to quality assurance” so 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 strategies (in-house …