Abstract
South Tyrol in Italy, and Catalonia and the Basque Country in Spain share a multilingual local identity within monolingual states. These three regions fall within the regime of linguistic autonomy, which combines local multilingualism with monolingualism at the state level. In this kind of territory, both state institutions and individuals need to possess a certain degree of bilingualism. For example, to respect the right of citizens to use the official language they prefer, public institutions must be provided of all necessary resources to achieve bilingualism. This usually occurs through a combination of bilingual employees and language professionals (translators, interpreters, etc.), though with differences. In this contribution, we will reflect on how the responsibility for institutional bilingualism is distributed between employees and translators by comparing translation policies of a selection of Catalan, Basque and South-Tyrolean institutions. We conclude that more efficient translation policies do not necessarily lead to a more balanced distribution of linguistic obligations among institutional representatives.