My cookie preferencesInstitutional translation practices in South Tyrol: An exploratory study on civil servants working as ‘occasional translators’
De Camillis F
Italian is the official language of Italy (Decree 670/1972, Law 482/1999). However, many other dialects and languages coexist within the country, Italy in fact also being the European nation with the greatest number of minority languages, i.e. 12 (Palermo 2004). Among these, three stand out in particular, namely French in the Aosta Valley, Slovene in Friuli-Venezia Giulia and German in South Tyrol (Toso 2008). This contribution will focus on South Tyrol, as part of a PhD project that investigates the translation workflow of a local public administration. South Tyrol has been an Italian territory since 1919, following the decline of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in the wake of World War I (Lantschner 2001). Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of citizens remain German-speaking (69.5%), compared with 26% of native Italian-speakers and 4.5% of Ladin-speakers (ASTAT 2012). German and Italian have been the region’s co-official languages since 1972.
The New Autonomy Statute (Decree 670/1972) and the Decree 547/1988 contain the current translation policies of South Tyrol. On the one hand, the Statute affirms that citizens have the right to communicate with the public institutions in Italian, German or Ladin, both in written and oral form. It also contains the requirement for public servants to pass the so-called ‘bilingualism exam’, to demonstrate their linguistic competence in German and Italian (Pizzorusso 2001). On the other hand, Decree 547/1988 regulates policy concerning written documents, requiring that several types of public documents must be made available in Italian and German. Finally, according to the collective bargaining agreement of 08/03/2006, every public servant is duty-bound, upon request, to carry out translations. As shown, there is no specific mention of translation processes or bilingual drafting in the decrees. The only language-related department is the Office for Language Issues, where 12 people work mainly on the linguistic review of legal texts, but they do not translate administrative documents.
In light of these premises and by conducting qualitative interviews, a pilot study in 2017 looked at how document multilingualism is coordinated within the provincial administration. Twenty public servants of the provincial administration participated in the interviews. The interviews showed that the administrative documents are regularly translated. The translation usually takes place in the same office where the document is composed and is usually carried out by a public servant. However, none of the interviewees is a professional translator; more often than not, they have legal or technical background. Many of them translate into the second language, CAT tools are mostly unknown to them, almost no one systematically collects terminology and none of them has attended training courses in translation. Most importantly, the study also revealed how they feel about this mandatory task. Some may occasionally translate simple, repetitive text while others may spend several hours per week or deal with complex documents. In both cases, they are often not comfortable with this obligation and wonder why they are asked do it, in spite of the fact that they are not professional translators.
These results lead to the conclusion that the analysed institution might benefit from a deeper investigation of its internal translation policies, in order to gain a better understanding of the environment. Afterwards, the execution of some specific measures like professional training for public servants, introduction of translation guidelines and modern translation resources, as well as a structured organisation of the translation workflow would help managing this important but underestimated task. In order to follow-up on the results of the pilot study, a PhD-project started in November 2017.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv2269hww
