Some links/Links

1. Tradulinguas conference in Lisbon: There was a legal translation conference in Lisbon recently, which I couldn't go to. Philippa Hammond has a report with links on her blog, Blogging Translator. I would have been interested to hear some of the speakers. I see one of them was a Netherlands lawyer-translator called Antoinette Dop, who I once exchanged business cards with in Hammick's in London. One of the links leads to a PDF - scroll down here to Ingemar Strandvik - about multilingual drafting in the EU. The PDF must be by Ingemar Strandvik, although it has no name on it, and it refers to a 'study', which I presume means the conference paper. One thing that I wonder about the EU is how far the translators are responsible for the legislation - I had always assumed that it was the product of legislators, not necessarily linguists or even lawyers - and I presume that is true of the first drafts, but these are followed by translation into the remaining of the 23 languages. This is not a co-drafting process in 23 languages as such but a system based on three alternating stages: drafting in the source language, translation into all of the official languages and legal revision of the different language versions with a view to ensuring that each one has equivalent legal value. Translations thus become authentic documents and translators’ responsibility is equal to that of the authors of the source texts. It would be interesting to hear some details of how the …