La traducció administrativa avui: mètodes i problemes

Resum

The establishment of International and regional organisms working in more than one official language (sometimes with different traditional legal codes) and the formation of a bilingual juridical framework presents a new challenge to translators. In order to meet this challenge several university bodies for the training of translators and interpreters have been created, as have diplomas in legal translation, in which professional translators may acquire a profound knowledge of the legal matter to be translated, the registers of the language and the administrative organization. Due to its official character and use, administrative translation must be literal and, remaining strictly faithful to the original, must respect the style and natural expression of the target language. In an administrative translation from Spanish to Catalan personal names (with a single official form) are left unchanged, place-names in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands are translated into Catalan if the translation is used in the territories in which Catalan is official. On the other hand, names of institutions, posts and laws and decrees are translated systematically, although some general criteria and concrete forms for the translation of names and institutions should be adopted, and divergent Catalan translations should not be admitted in those autonomous communities where Catalan is the official language. Finally, models of Catalan administrative documents should not be based on a Spanish version, but rather the style and the design must be radically revised to establish the up-dated Catalan model, and only then a Spanish version can be arrived at from the Catalan original version.