The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2017 - 27

With this kind of diversity, presumably there
are different specifications and formats to
respect. How much standardization is there?
How much influence does the Translation
Centre wield in this area?
We receive original documents in a
wide range of formats, including Word
documents, PowerPoint, Excel files,
InDesign documents, XML files for
websites, and MP4 files for videos to be
subtitled. There are de facto standards,
but the variety of clients prevents us from
imposing any one in particular. This is
because we need to be able to deal with
the formats of the documents created in
all the agencies we work for.

Finding the right mix between
technology and a human
approach to our operations is
always a precarious balance.

The Translation Centre has three language
groups. Please tell us what those groups
consist of and how they are organized.
The Translation Centre has a little over
110 in-house translators covering the
24 official languages of the EU. These
24 languages are grouped into three
language groups:
■■

Language Group 1:
Finno-Ugric, Baltic, and Slavonic

■■

Language Group 2:
Germanic and Slavonic

■■

Language Group 3:
Romance and Mediterranean

Each language group is subdivided into
translation teams, one for each official
language. The size of each team varies
according to the translation workload into
each target language.

The translators in these groups translate
into their native languages and have
varied academic backgrounds, mostly
linguistically-oriented. Please tell us about
their specific duties and what sort of onthe-job training they receive.
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The Centre's business model is based
on extensive outsourcing because we
don't have enough in-house translators
to handle the volume of work we're
expected to process. Around 80-85%
of our translations are outsourced to
external contractors. Our in-house
translators then assess and revise all
outsourced translations. This is an
essential step because the in-house
translators are familiar with our clients'
preferred terminology, their specific
requirements, and the linguistic and
stylistic conventions used across all EU
institutions and agencies. The in-house
staff translates urgent or very urgent
documents and confidential documents
that cannot be outsourced. They are also
involved in creating client glossaries that
are eventually fed into the Inter-Active
Terminology for Europe (IATE) database,
the joint terminology database for all
the institutions/bodies of the EU. The
Translation Centre manages the technical
aspects of the IATE project on behalf of
the project partners.
Translators are offered training
throughout their careers at the Centre,
both in terms of language learning
(developing existing language skills
and acquiring new languages) and
client-specific activities (seminars and
workshops on specific thematic domains,
such as financial supervision or border
guard training).

The Translation Centre also has a section
that liaises with its clients. Please tell us
something about this process.
We have a small external relations and
communication section that serves as
a link between the in-house staff and
our clients. We process the feedback
we receive from our clients about the
quality of our translations. We also
organize seminars and workshops
with our clients, and they bring their
experts to provide our translators with
information about the key terms they use
in their documents and explain the basic
concepts of their specific mission. These
experts can tell our language teams why
they prefer to use this or that variant in
a particular context. The knowledge we
acquire at these seminars is incredibly
useful to our translators, who then use
it when they revise translations done by
our freelance contractors.
All this is part of a global holistic
approach to quality assurance. If we didn't
have this internal pool of in-house revisers
and translators or organize these seminars,
we wouldn't be able to integrate our
clients' preferred terminology and specific
requirements into our workflow and
processes. This mechanism is a crucial
aspect of our activity. I'm sure we would
fail in our mission if we were "just" a
mailbox between hundreds of freelancers
and our clients. We would miss many
American Translators Association

27
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2017
