Quality Assurance At The Council Of The Eu'S Translation Service

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to describe quality assurance mechanisms at the Translation Service of the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU (GSC). The first part will put the GSC's translation activity into a more general framework of the workings of the whole institution. Furthermore, the GSC's approach to translation quality will be explained, and tools and procedures that are used and help translators achieve the required quality of their products will be described. The next part will focus on the ex-post quality monitoring that was introduced a few years ago to systematically monitor both the quality of translations that leave the Translation Service and the individual performance of translators. The final part will be dedicated to a recently-adopted special procedure to ensure the best quality of the GSC Translation Service’s hallmark product – the European Council conclusions. The chapter is descriptively oriented and draws on everyday practice of a GSC's translator and the quality policy coordinator. Hopefully, it will raise awareness of the activities of the GSC's Translation Service, provide inspiration for other translation departments and practitioners and offer topics for further research for academia. With approximately 600 translators and 300 other management and support staff, the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU’s Translation Service is a little smaller than the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Translation and about half the size of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation, but still large by most standards. Each year the Council’s service translates around 15,000 documents, which represent roughly 110,000 pages of source material and a yearly translation output, expressed as a sum of all target languages, in the range of 1.2 million pages (Council 2016a, Council 2017). However, quality rather than quantity has always been the primary focus of the Council’s Translation Service, and the aim of this chapter is to describe the quality assurance mechanisms that are used at the Council’s Translation Service to ensure the required quality of its products.