The (legal and official) translator’s multifacetism

Abstract

This paper aims to describe professional translation as a complex activity, both as a multitask-activity and as a mental operation. It enumerates different activities and practices of various types which, in different degrees and in a complementary way, can be found when observing the multifaceted activity of translating. As a complex activity, translating does not exclusively consist of solely a mental or manual operation, but is the result of various activities carried out to serve the same goal. These activities can be detected practically in any specialty of translation and not only in legal and official translations, although some of them are more prototypical of these types of translation. Currently, the characterization of translating as a complex activity is most often approached from the point of view of competences, a concept which originated in the study of the training of translators and the implementation of professional standards for their selection and hiring. The concept of competence seems somewhat detached from all professional reality and escapes from circumstances which are determinant in the characterization of the dynamic professional activity. For this reason, in order to describe the complexity of the operation of translating, this paper favours the description of human activities or tasks directly observable by any practitioner or scholar. In this paper the different levels or facets of translating include the translator as a communicator, linguist, jurist, emulator, detective, business- person, professional, public servant, benefactor, carer, public notary, messenger, risk evaluator, deontologist, trainee, trainer, theoretician and artisan.