Translation policies and institutional bilingualism: A comparison

Abstract

South Tyrol in Italy, and Catalonia and the Basque Country in Spain share the characteristic of having a multilingual local identity within monolingual states. These three regions are set within the regime of linguistic autonomy, which combines local multilingualism with monolingualism at the State level. In this kind of territories, both State institutions and individuals need to possess a certain degree of bilingualism. For example, to respect the right of citizens to use whichever official language they prefer, public institutions must provide all the necessary resources to ensure bilingualism. This usually occurs through a combination of bilingual civil servants and language professionals (translators, interpreters, etc.), albeit with different balances. In this article, we reflect on how the responsibility for institutional bilingualism is distributed between civil servants and translators by comparing the 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.