Extract

Daniele Orlando, Trieste

Tying Quality and Training: an Ariadne’s Thread out of the Legal Translation Labyrinth

Abstract: This paper reports the results of an EU-wide survey on current practices in legal translator training in the EU, conducted as part of a European project called QUALETRA, established in response to Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings.

1. Background

Translation quality as provided for in Article 5 of Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 October 2010 on the Right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings (hereinafter “the Directive”) is a major milestone in the marathon towards translation in criminal proceedings as a human right. The ideal that nobody should be denied a fair trial for the sole reason that they cannot speak or understand the language of the country in which they are prosecuted has been a long time in the making, initiated back in 1948 with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and is still a work in progress over sixty years later. Nevertheless, the adequacy of the language assistance granted is the Achilles’ heel of this legal instrument, which still sets a highly ambitious destination without defining any clear route to get there. As a result, each Member State has followed a different path in implementing transposing measures, characterised by the lack of a proper definition of which documents are to be deemed essential, which might result in the...