Abstract
This article is concerned with institutional translation practice in the European Union (EU) Institutions, especially the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission. The main objective of this study is to examine the role that style guides and translation manuals play in this context.
A section is devoted to literature dealing with the topic of such manuals. As a first empirical area of interest, an analysis of the EU Inter-Institutional Style Guide is pursued.
Secondly, work-flow at the DGT is studied with special focus on the usage of style guides and translation guidelines, followed by an analysis of guidelines for the translation contractors. The latter shows that the amount of information offered to the external language services providers is extensive and, in some instances, neither harmonised, nor structured.
This results in contradicting rules and even meta-guidelines. Thus, a suggestion is made to unify or harmonise those resources to achieve more clarity, better accessibility of the data, and thus to make them more effective.
As a fourth field of interest, the future of style guides is sketched with respect to workflow automation and the proliferation of machine translation systems. The concluding remarks discuss some of the areas for future research.