Translating Institutions: An Ethnographic Study of EU Translation

by Kaisa Koskinen

Translating Institutions outlines a framework for research on translation in institutional settings, using the Finnish translation unit at the European Commission as a case study. Because of their foundational multilingualism, the institutions of the European Union could be described as both translating and translated institutions. The European Commission alone employs nearly two thousand translators, and it is translators who draft the vast majority of outgoing EU messages. Translating Institutions sets out to explore the organizational role and professional identity of this group of cultural mediators, a group that has remained relatively invisible despite its size and central institutional role, and to use the analysis of this data to elaborate broader methodological and theoretical issues.

Translating Institutions adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the life and work of the translators at the centre of this study. In practice, this entails employing a number of different methods and interrogating various types of data. The three-level research design used covers the study of the institutional framework, the study of translators working in specific institutional settings, and the study of translated documents and their source texts. This is therefore a study of both texts and people in their institutional habitat. Given the methodological focus of the volume, the different methods and data are outlined in independent the institutional framework of translation (institutional ethnography), the physical location of the unit (observation), translators' own views of their role (focus group discussions), and a sociologically-oriented text analysis of a sample document (shifts analysis).

Translating Institutions constitutes a valuable contribution to the sociology of translation. It opens up new avenues for research and offers a detailed framework for the study of institutional translation.

190 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 4, 2008

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will not be for everyone.
For me, the academic baggage is off-putting and unrewarding: Koskinen spends too much of the book (mainly in the first part, risking losing many potential readers before they get to the meat of it) spelling out her theoretical positions, which seem to me frankly trivial, in the sense that the core of the book is her description of and discussions with members of the Finnish translation unit of the European Commission in Luxembourg, and her reflections on what inferences can be drawn from these about the personal, institutional and organisational complications and compromises involved in the noble, but everywhere undermined, attempt to maintain and present a supranational political and economic entity to the world and to its citizens in all the many (official) languages those citizens use, as well as giving a general feeling of what happens to the footsoldiers of that glorious enterprise, exiled in an isolated corner of a once grand but now rundown building in the EU quarter of a tiny country, far from their former home and not quite integrated into their new one, gradually realising the forlornness of their fates.

Apologies for the ridiculously long sentence. I think it is at least easier to follow than much of the academic agonising in the first third or so of this book. But the second part has quite a bit of human and even political interest.

In short, if any of this is of interest to you, I recommend you just go straight to Part II, unless you too are an academic sociologist.