Abstract
At the border between Italy and Austria, translating is a common reality both in the public and in the private sphere. South Tyrolean public institutions are bilingual and partly trilingual by law and for them, too, translating is a daily activity. They publish a great quantity of institutional documents in Italian and German, partly in Ladin, that vary from highly binding texts (e.g. laws, decrees) to less or non-binding documents (e.g. forms, informative texts). In our study, we focused our attention on the biggest local public body, i.e. the local administration, where around 3.000 employees write documents on a daily basis. In here, both professional and non-professional translators are in charge of translating. By means of a questionnaire that received a 43% response rate (1.276 answers), we inquired into the non-professional translation activity by asking directly to the employees about procedures, assignments, time spent and tools. Moreover, we collected their opinions and suggestions on the improvements they would like to see realized in their work environment. In this contribution, after describing the study background and methodology as well as its main results, we will focus on the tools used for translating by the administration’s employees. These appear to be substantially different from those used by professional translators, although they share similar needs. We refer in particular to translation memories, terminology collections and machine translation. Furthermore, starting from the employees’ suggestions and opinions, we will comment on technological improvements that might prove useful in a non-professional translation environment, mostly considering the development of already available, local resources. Although our study deals with a local reality, we consider that its results and conclusions might be of interest also to the international community, as non-professional translation in public bodies is probably a highly widespread, yet little documented phenomenon.