Abstract
Public institutions in South Tyrol, Italy, are officially multilingual. They must communicate with citizens in the language chosen by the latter, be it Italian or German (or Ladin in the Ladin valleys) both orally and in writing. This includes the translation of legally binding documents (i.e. laws, decrees) as much as administrative and informative documents. Especially for the two last text types, each department is responsible on its own. As in many multilingual institutions (Mossop 1988; Koskinen 2008; Schäffner, Tcaciuc, and Tesseur 2014; Burckhardt 2014; Meylaerts 2012), one would expect to find translation facilities in each department. Our study aimed to determine whether this applies also to South Tyrolean institutions.
This contribution focuses on the methodological approach chosen to study the translation processes in the provincial administration of South Tyrol. It combined qualitative and quantitative, sociological and linguistic research techniques. The four-year study consisted of a preliminary phase where a small group of civil servants participated in semi-structured interviews on translation practices. Later on, we asked the same questions to the entire institution (around 3,000 people) by means of an online survey. The main objective of the survey was to find out whether non-professional translation (Antonini et al. 2017; Aguilar-Solano 2015; Galiano 2020; Pérez-González and Susam-Saraeva 2012) was an established practice, as the interviews had showed. As for the translation product, we performed a linguistic analysis of the readability and complexity of a small corpus of institutional documents. Finally, we compared our results with institutional translation practices in two Spanish autonomies to widen our perspective on multilingual institutions in minority contexts (Branchadell and West 2005; González Núñez 2013; Li, Qian, and Meylaerts 2017; González Núñez and Meylaerts 2017).
We will argue that a mixed-method approach has proven fruitful not only to gain a comprehensive picture of translation practices, but also to achieve valuable insights on related issues, such as institutional communication and polities. Considering the main object of the study as one link in a much longer chain – made of deep-rooted and sometimes contradictory rules and conventions – has led us to more concrete and realistic conclusions on required improvements.