Poirier, Éric and Gallego-Hernández, Daniel, eds. (2018): Business and Institutional Translation: New Insights and Reflections. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 240 p.

The dynamic field of business and institutional translation has not been given as much attention by academics in translation studies compared to its technical, medical or literary counterparts. However, there is a recent trend in publications and events that focuses on this specialization. In line with this interest, this book has two specific aims as the editors specify in their introduction: to enhance efforts to recognize the importance of the field and to keep academics and practitioners abreast of innovations and reflections in this respect.

In the initial section on institutional translation, the first chapter brings to light the importance of multilingual or bilingual websites for universities and the challenges that these websites pose at the macro-level (what should be translated, division of tasks among translators and revisors, cooperation with technical staff and directionality) and at the micro-level (terminological and stylistic issues). The chapter offers some solutions to these problems based on the authors’ experience translating the website of a Turkish university. The second chapter is an inquiry into quality assurance processes in governmental institutions in seven countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy and Poland). The aim was to compare their use of translation technology, translation manuals or style guides with their quality management strategy through an international survey that was conducted in the different institutions. The results reveal a diverse landscape of practices in translation in this area. The third chapter of this section defends the urgent need to standardize terminologies and translations within and between South Korean government institutions. To this end, the author compiles a Korean-English parallel corpus to analyze and compare terminologies in three South Korean government institutions. The results show clear inconsistencies which resulted in discrepancies in translation. The author thus makes a case for more careful, corpus-based research on the issue of standardization. The final chapter of this section on institutional translation highlights the need to implement rigorous standards for the professionalization of translation in the Arab world with a focus on the important role that the academic context of this field plays in this sense.

The second section on business, finance and accounting opens with a chapter that deals with the terminology of real estate purchase agreements, which are considered hybrid texts and thus will contain terms from secondary fields of specialization. The methodology is based on a parallel corpus. The author analyzes the level of specialization of the terms and the different translation techniques applied to transfer their meaning from English into Spanish. The second chapter of this section supplements the preceding argumentation surrounding the use of a corpus methodology to study the terminology of a given area, in this case consolidated financial statements in French. The corpus consists of consolidated statements of profits or losses from companies in French-speaking countries (Belgium, Canada, France, Morocco and Switzerland). The chapter describes the terminology used by listed companies in these countries and specifically analyzes to what extent the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have been implemented on a linguistic level. It is worth noting that the chapter’s results reveal a high degree of variation in the terminology used rather than the harmonization one would expect if the IFRS were applied. The third chapter discusses the adoption of a conceptual perspective with the graphic representation of notions to properly understand financial concepts, also in relation with the IFRS, but in this case the language combination is Italian-French. The fourth chapter reviews localization of two m-commerce applications into the Arabic language to respond to new conceptual needs. The fifth chapter provides a reflection on the metaphorical process in the language of economics, from a linguistic perspective, and proposes a classification for metaphors and a lexicographical datasheet. This is particularly significant as it could serve as a starting point for the elaboration of further lexicographical tools related to comparative and contrastive linguistic studies, which could be of great use for the translation practice. This section closes with a chapter that provides an overview of how national and international companies manage terminologies in a multilingual environment. The article shows how language, and more specifically terminology, is not regarded as something important until a problem appears. Thus, the authors argue in favor of prioritizing terminology management, which would enhance a company’s performance.

The final section focuses on specialized translation from a pedagogical perspective. In the first chapter, the author conducts a study on legal translation in which a contrastive analysis, based on comparative law, is used to avoid meaning errors. The results reveal the importance of using this methodology in contrast to having only bilingual lexicographical resources as a reference for this type of specialized translation. The second chapter approaches the training of prospective translators enrolled in Translation and Interpreting degrees in Spain with a specific focus on foreign trade content applied to translation. Conclusions reveal that it is a neglected field in translation courses and that more emphasis should be placed on it since international companies offer many opportunities for these graduates. This would help bridge the gap between professional needs related to foreign trade and university training in translation and interpreting. The third chapter assesses the profile of translators in the Saudi translation market as part of a larger project to evaluate and develop university translation programs in this country. Results show that the policies and regulations of the translation market, as well as translator training programs in Saudi universities, should be revised to enhance the current status of the profession in the country. The fourth chapter assesses the use of discussion forums as a tool for reflection, self-evaluation and peer learning in a specialized English-French translation course. Finally, the last chapter shows the usefulness of using a specialized multilingual comparable corpus for the practice of translation. A comparison is made between how this can be used by the novice translator and the experienced translator. The authors argue in favor of this methodology when working with specialized texts since the quality of the translation is not only enhanced from the point of view of content but also from the perspective of the terminology and phraseology that are typically used in the field.

Overall, the different chapters of this book make it an excellent starting point both for researchers and practitioners in search of new ideas for projects and students embarking on a translation degree. The two editors of the volume, Éric Poirier and Daniel Gallego-Hernández, from the University of Québec in Trois-Rivières and Alicante University, have published extensively in this field and have successfully gathered a very insightful variety of research material in the different chapters to give valuable insight into the latest innovations in the field of financial and institutional translation. These results contribute to the existing literature and make the book an asset to scholars, students and practitioners alike.