Institutional Illusions

To understand the task of translators it is essential to take into account the institutional constraints affecting their work. The Translation Service of the Commission of the European Union (EU), the largest translation agency in the world, offers plenty of material to analyze the assumptions and expectations related to translation. Two important themes in EU translation are (the illusions of) equality and equivalence: the main purpose of the massive translation system is to safeguard the equal status of all official languages, and the cornerstone of the translation policy is the equal value of all language versions. In the EU context, equivalence is therefore not a qualitative requirement but an a priori characteristic of all translations, regardless of other qualities these translations might have. The equivalence relation not only exists between the source text and the translation but is automatically extended to link various translations of the same text. In practice, the notion of equivalence is accompanied by a rather mechanistic and limited conception of translation. It would be in the interest of both translators and the Commission to rethink the role of translators in this context.