Session

Revision has traditionally been conceived as the final step of the translation workflow, which can take various forms depending on several factors, such as the type and degree of revision needed, the number of professionals involved, the time allocated, whether international standards must be complied with, etc. The course will present settings where collaborative forms of revision of legal and judicial texts translated from Italian into English are performed in ways that deviate from the standard translation workflow, i.e. the translation-editing-proofreading (TEP) framework.

The first setting is academic and concerns two translation projects conducted at the IUSLIT Department for Legal, Language, Interpretation and Translation Sciences of the University of Trieste. In the first project, aimed at the translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure, revision was carried out almost simultaneously with translation. In the second project, Italian judgments dealing with immigration and asylum cases were translated only after the source texts underwent an editing phase so as to facilitate final revision. The second setting is institutional and regards an ongoing collaboration with the Italian Constitutional Court.

Despite the differences in the projects presented, in both settings translators and revisers work in close collaboration with lawyers who are either experts in the field or even the authors of the source texts. These practices, which ensure a higher quality of the final product, would probably be economically unsustainable in the freelance translation industry. However, the aim of the course is to use concrete examples to highlight the necessary involvement of translators and revisers as well as experts and drafters in the whole translation workflow, which should be seen as a circular process rather than a linear one, and to inspire reflection and debate on the skills translators and revisers should have to perform their job efficiently.

The course is aimed at translators and legal experts working with legal texts as well as at scholars and students interested in the revision and in general in the translation workflow.