Ingemar Strandvik | European Commission (original) (raw)
Papers by Ingemar Strandvik
arXiv (Cornell University), May 27, 2024
The year 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework ... more The year 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework for analytic translation quality evaluation. The MQM error typology has been widely used by practitioners in the translation and localization industry and has served as the basis for many derivative projects. The annual Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) shared tasks on both human and automatic translation quality evaluations used the MQM error typology. The metric stands on two pillars: error typology and the scoring model. The scoring model calculates the quality score from annotation data, detailing how to convert error type and severity counts into numeric scores to determine if the content meets specifications. Previously, only the raw scoring model had been published. This April, the MQM Council published the Linear Calibrated Scoring Model, officially presented herein, along with the Non-Linear Scoring Model, which had not been published before. This paper details the latest MQM developments and presents a universal approach to translation quality measurement across three sample size ranges. It also explains why Statistical Quality Control should be used for very small sample sizes, starting from a single sentence.
Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones... more Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones de la Unión Europea en el contexto de la transparencia y de la llamada gobernanza europea, dos de las prioridades políticas de hoy. La hipótesis es que se atisban cambios importantes para la actividad traductora de las instituciones europeas y que un enfoque funcional como el que proponen, por ejemplo, Katharina Reiss y Christiane Nord nos podría ofrecer las herramientas necesarias para afrontar las nuevas exigencias. Palabras clave: transparencia, traducción funcional, tipos de texto, funciones comunicativas, encargo de traducción 1 Transparencia y traducción La transparencia aparece en el discurso político europeo en 1992, con el trasfondo de la falta de legitimidad y el llamado déficit democrático, que quedó patente en Maastricht en relación con el paso a la Unión Europea (UE) y se agravó con el «no» danés al Tratado de Maastricht. Desde entonces reina el consenso en cuanto a la necesidad de hacer de la UE una organización más transparente; y a partir de aquel momento encontramos pocas conclusiones o declaraciones de la UE en las que no se haga mención de las virtudes de la transparencia.
Machine translation, 2018
Translation quality and translation quality management are key concerns for the European Commissi... more Translation quality and translation quality management are key concerns for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), and the European Union institutions more broadly. Translated texts are often legally binding, politically sensitive, confidential or important for the image of the institutions. For legislative texts, an important principle of EU law is that there is no ‘original’: all language versions are equivalent and equally authentic. Consistency in translation strategies and in the approach to quality is therefore critical.
The theory and practice of legislation, May 7, 2015
Abstract This article discusses whether EU multilingual lawmaking could be carried out in a more ... more Abstract This article discusses whether EU multilingual lawmaking could be carried out in a more professional way. What does it mean to work in a professional manner? Who are the people involved? What skills and competences do they need at each stage of the process? How do they acquire these skills and competences? Are they rather taken for granted? The premises for the reflection is the fact that 23 language versions of the EU law are drafted by translators and the 24th, mostly the English, by non-lawyers or non-native speakers. Reference is made to the Interinstitutional Agreement on Common Guidelines for the Quality of the Drafting, the Joint Practical Guide for the Drafting of EU legislation, the European and ISO Standards on Service Requirements for Translation Services and the ISO Standards on terminological working methods. The article concludes that there is scope for further improvement, both as regards awareness-raising, competence-raising and workflow integration. It suggests that the way forward implies further implementation of the Interinstitutional Agreement from 1998 and that the understanding we have of legislative drafting and legal translation affects both the way we organise the work and the end result of it.
Machine translation, 2018
Today translation quality assessment is a hot topic in Europe, even more so than in the past. Tra... more Today translation quality assessment is a hot topic in Europe, even more so than in the past. Translation quality assessment will also play a crucial role in the attempts to increase the public appreciation and legal protection of the profession. Despite its growing importance, there is still a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance over the term translation quality assessment.
El español, lengua de traducción: Actas del I congreso internacional, 2002, págs. 459-467, 2002
Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones... more Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones de la Unión Europea en el contexto de la transparencia y de la llamada gobernanza europea, dos de las prioridades políticas de hoy. La hipótesis es que se atisban cambios importantes para la actividad traductora de las instituciones europeas y que un enfoque funcional como el que proponen, por ejemplo, Katharina Reiss y Christiane Nord nos podría ofrecer las herramientas necesarias para afrontar las nuevas exigencias. Palabras clave: transparencia, traducción funcional, tipos de texto, funciones comunicativas, encargo de traducción 1 Transparencia y traducción La transparencia aparece en el discurso político europeo en 1992, con el trasfondo de la falta de legitimidad y el llamado déficit democrático, que quedó patente en Maastricht en relación con el paso a la Unión Europea (UE) y se agravó con el «no» danés al Tratado de Maastricht. Desde entonces reina el consenso en cuanto a la necesidad de hacer de la UE una organización más transparente; y a partir de aquel momento encontramos pocas conclusiones o declaraciones de la UE en las que no se haga mención de las virtudes de la transparencia.
The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1500 in-house t... more The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing. This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-for-purpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and questions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text c...
Quality has been on translation scholars’ minds since the emergence of Translation Studies (TS) a... more Quality has been on translation scholars’ minds since the emergence of Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline in the 1970s, with one of the seminal monographs by Juliane House being published in 1977. More recently, with TS shifting its focus to integrate non-literary texts more broadly (cf. Rogers 2015), the quality aspect has been researched across various specialized fields and genres. One of these fields is Institutional Translation, where the quest for product and process quality underlies the raison d’être of in-house translation teams. This field requires further in-depth research into quality aspects to combine and crossfertilize theory and practice. The purpose of this collective monograph is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretica...
Machine Translation: Technologies and Applications, 2018
The relevance of, and justification for, translation quality assessment (TQA) is stronger than ev... more The relevance of, and justification for, translation quality assessment (TQA) is stronger than ever: professional translators, their clients, translatological researchers and trainee translators all rely on TQA for different reasons. Yet whereas there is general agreement about the need for a translation to be "good," "satisfactory" or "acceptable," the definition of acceptability and of the means of determining it are matters of ongoing debate. National and international translation standards now exist, but there are no generally accepted objective criteria for evaluating the quality of translations. What are the problems and issues that stand in the way of consensus and coherence in TQA? This article presents an updated argumentation-centred model to solve some of those problems
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house tran... more The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing. This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-forpurpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and questions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text categ...
Introducción Cuando se abordan temas de traducción en relación con el Servicio de Traducción de l... more Introducción Cuando se abordan temas de traducción en relación con el Servicio de Traducción de la Comisión Europea, hay que tener en cuenta el tamaño de este servicio: más de mil traductores, repartidos en seis grupos temáticos con once secciones lingüísticas en cada uno. Dos de los grupos temáticos -es decir, una tercera parte del serviciose encuentran en Luxemburgo, los otros cuatro están en Bruselas
Tämä artikkeli käsittelee oikeuskääntämiseen ja monikieliseen lainsäädäntötyöhön liittyvää termin... more Tämä artikkeli käsittelee oikeuskääntämiseen ja monikieliseen lainsäädäntötyöhön liittyvää terminologiatyötä EU-kontekstissa, jossa yhdistyvät EU-tason eri maita koskeva yhteinen lainsäädäntö ja 28 jäsenmaan 24 kielellä toteutettava kansallinen lainsäädäntö. Artikkelin aluksi käydään lyhyesti läpi eurooppalaisen poliittisen, oikeudellisen ja taloudellisen yhteistyön historiaa ja rakennetta. Oikeustieteen ja oikeuskielen erityispiirteitä esitellään sekä yleisesti että Euroopan unionin näkökulmasta. EU:n käännös-ja terminologiatyötä tarkastellaan artikkelissa sekä normittavan ohjeistuksen että käytännön työprosessin vaiheiden kautta. Keskeinen rooli prosessissa on Euroopan komission käännöstoimen pääosaston (DGT) kääntäjillä sekä juristilingvisteillä, jotka tarkastavat kääntäjien termivalinnat ja arvioivat pitääkö EU-käsitteet ilmaista itsenäisillä EU-termeillä (käsite-ja termiautonomia) vai voiko kansallista termistöä käyttää myös EU-yhteydessä. Artikkelin lopuksi nostetaan esimerkkien kautta esiin EU:n terminologiatyön käsiteautonomiaan ja synonymiaan liittyviä haasteita sekä pohditaan nk. tavaramerkkiajatteluun liittyviä uudenlaisia ominaispiirteitä. Jos eri ilmiöitä ei EU:ssa nimetä kaikilla virallisilla kielillä vaan ainoastaan englanniksi (esimerkiksi Common Agricultural Policy/CAP, Seventh Framework Programme/FP7), näkyvät vaikutukset sekä termistössä että vähitellen myös eri kielten arvostuksessa ja näkyvyydessä tavalla joka on vastoin EU:n monikielisyyden perusperiaatetta.
This paper aims at highlighting some of the challenges involved in translating legal texts as par... more This paper aims at highlighting some of the challenges involved in translating legal texts as part of the multilingual lawmaking process of the European Union. The author posits that it is the function of the target texts that makes the difference between legal translation as part of multilingual lawmaking and other types of legal translation. In multilingual lawmaking, the resulting language versions are the law, not just information about law applicable elsewhere. Since the different authentic language versions are the law, they must comply with the basic quality requirements for legislation, such as accessibility, predictability, and non-discrimination. This, in turn, has consequences for relating to the source text, both as regards terminology and drafting conventions. The joy and sorrow of the EU translator is found in working to strike the balance between fidelity to the source text, on the one hand, and the observance of these basic quality requirements for legislation, on the other. Drafting guidelines and the EN 15038 standard provide useful guidance in this delicate endeavour.
Resumen Si tuviéramos que presentar a nuestro personaje entrevistado a través de sus cualidades, ... more Resumen Si tuviéramos que presentar a nuestro personaje entrevistado a través de sus cualidades, diríamos que tiene la paciencia de un traductor, la agilidad mental de un intérprete, el rigor de un traductor jurado, la meticulosidad de un lexicógrafo y la visión integradora de un profesor. Bajo la apariencia de un comunicador nato se oculta una capacidad directiva que le lleva a tomar la iniciativa adecuada en cada momento...
arXiv (Cornell University), May 27, 2024
The year 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework ... more The year 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework for analytic translation quality evaluation. The MQM error typology has been widely used by practitioners in the translation and localization industry and has served as the basis for many derivative projects. The annual Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) shared tasks on both human and automatic translation quality evaluations used the MQM error typology. The metric stands on two pillars: error typology and the scoring model. The scoring model calculates the quality score from annotation data, detailing how to convert error type and severity counts into numeric scores to determine if the content meets specifications. Previously, only the raw scoring model had been published. This April, the MQM Council published the Linear Calibrated Scoring Model, officially presented herein, along with the Non-Linear Scoring Model, which had not been published before. This paper details the latest MQM developments and presents a universal approach to translation quality measurement across three sample size ranges. It also explains why Statistical Quality Control should be used for very small sample sizes, starting from a single sentence.
Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones... more Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones de la Unión Europea en el contexto de la transparencia y de la llamada gobernanza europea, dos de las prioridades políticas de hoy. La hipótesis es que se atisban cambios importantes para la actividad traductora de las instituciones europeas y que un enfoque funcional como el que proponen, por ejemplo, Katharina Reiss y Christiane Nord nos podría ofrecer las herramientas necesarias para afrontar las nuevas exigencias. Palabras clave: transparencia, traducción funcional, tipos de texto, funciones comunicativas, encargo de traducción 1 Transparencia y traducción La transparencia aparece en el discurso político europeo en 1992, con el trasfondo de la falta de legitimidad y el llamado déficit democrático, que quedó patente en Maastricht en relación con el paso a la Unión Europea (UE) y se agravó con el «no» danés al Tratado de Maastricht. Desde entonces reina el consenso en cuanto a la necesidad de hacer de la UE una organización más transparente; y a partir de aquel momento encontramos pocas conclusiones o declaraciones de la UE en las que no se haga mención de las virtudes de la transparencia.
Machine translation, 2018
Translation quality and translation quality management are key concerns for the European Commissi... more Translation quality and translation quality management are key concerns for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), and the European Union institutions more broadly. Translated texts are often legally binding, politically sensitive, confidential or important for the image of the institutions. For legislative texts, an important principle of EU law is that there is no ‘original’: all language versions are equivalent and equally authentic. Consistency in translation strategies and in the approach to quality is therefore critical.
The theory and practice of legislation, May 7, 2015
Abstract This article discusses whether EU multilingual lawmaking could be carried out in a more ... more Abstract This article discusses whether EU multilingual lawmaking could be carried out in a more professional way. What does it mean to work in a professional manner? Who are the people involved? What skills and competences do they need at each stage of the process? How do they acquire these skills and competences? Are they rather taken for granted? The premises for the reflection is the fact that 23 language versions of the EU law are drafted by translators and the 24th, mostly the English, by non-lawyers or non-native speakers. Reference is made to the Interinstitutional Agreement on Common Guidelines for the Quality of the Drafting, the Joint Practical Guide for the Drafting of EU legislation, the European and ISO Standards on Service Requirements for Translation Services and the ISO Standards on terminological working methods. The article concludes that there is scope for further improvement, both as regards awareness-raising, competence-raising and workflow integration. It suggests that the way forward implies further implementation of the Interinstitutional Agreement from 1998 and that the understanding we have of legislative drafting and legal translation affects both the way we organise the work and the end result of it.
Machine translation, 2018
Today translation quality assessment is a hot topic in Europe, even more so than in the past. Tra... more Today translation quality assessment is a hot topic in Europe, even more so than in the past. Translation quality assessment will also play a crucial role in the attempts to increase the public appreciation and legal protection of the profession. Despite its growing importance, there is still a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance over the term translation quality assessment.
El español, lengua de traducción: Actas del I congreso internacional, 2002, págs. 459-467, 2002
Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones... more Resumen El objetivo de esta comunicación es ubicar la traducción que se hace en las instituciones de la Unión Europea en el contexto de la transparencia y de la llamada gobernanza europea, dos de las prioridades políticas de hoy. La hipótesis es que se atisban cambios importantes para la actividad traductora de las instituciones europeas y que un enfoque funcional como el que proponen, por ejemplo, Katharina Reiss y Christiane Nord nos podría ofrecer las herramientas necesarias para afrontar las nuevas exigencias. Palabras clave: transparencia, traducción funcional, tipos de texto, funciones comunicativas, encargo de traducción 1 Transparencia y traducción La transparencia aparece en el discurso político europeo en 1992, con el trasfondo de la falta de legitimidad y el llamado déficit democrático, que quedó patente en Maastricht en relación con el paso a la Unión Europea (UE) y se agravó con el «no» danés al Tratado de Maastricht. Desde entonces reina el consenso en cuanto a la necesidad de hacer de la UE una organización más transparente; y a partir de aquel momento encontramos pocas conclusiones o declaraciones de la UE en las que no se haga mención de las virtudes de la transparencia.
The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1500 in-house t... more The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing. This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-for-purpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and questions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text c...
Quality has been on translation scholars’ minds since the emergence of Translation Studies (TS) a... more Quality has been on translation scholars’ minds since the emergence of Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline in the 1970s, with one of the seminal monographs by Juliane House being published in 1977. More recently, with TS shifting its focus to integrate non-literary texts more broadly (cf. Rogers 2015), the quality aspect has been researched across various specialized fields and genres. One of these fields is Institutional Translation, where the quest for product and process quality underlies the raison d’être of in-house translation teams. This field requires further in-depth research into quality aspects to combine and crossfertilize theory and practice. The purpose of this collective monograph is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretica...
Machine Translation: Technologies and Applications, 2018
The relevance of, and justification for, translation quality assessment (TQA) is stronger than ev... more The relevance of, and justification for, translation quality assessment (TQA) is stronger than ever: professional translators, their clients, translatological researchers and trainee translators all rely on TQA for different reasons. Yet whereas there is general agreement about the need for a translation to be "good," "satisfactory" or "acceptable," the definition of acceptability and of the means of determining it are matters of ongoing debate. National and international translation standards now exist, but there are no generally accepted objective criteria for evaluating the quality of translations. What are the problems and issues that stand in the way of consensus and coherence in TQA? This article presents an updated argumentation-centred model to solve some of those problems
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house tran... more The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing. This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-forpurpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and questions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text categ...
Introducción Cuando se abordan temas de traducción en relación con el Servicio de Traducción de l... more Introducción Cuando se abordan temas de traducción en relación con el Servicio de Traducción de la Comisión Europea, hay que tener en cuenta el tamaño de este servicio: más de mil traductores, repartidos en seis grupos temáticos con once secciones lingüísticas en cada uno. Dos de los grupos temáticos -es decir, una tercera parte del serviciose encuentran en Luxemburgo, los otros cuatro están en Bruselas
Tämä artikkeli käsittelee oikeuskääntämiseen ja monikieliseen lainsäädäntötyöhön liittyvää termin... more Tämä artikkeli käsittelee oikeuskääntämiseen ja monikieliseen lainsäädäntötyöhön liittyvää terminologiatyötä EU-kontekstissa, jossa yhdistyvät EU-tason eri maita koskeva yhteinen lainsäädäntö ja 28 jäsenmaan 24 kielellä toteutettava kansallinen lainsäädäntö. Artikkelin aluksi käydään lyhyesti läpi eurooppalaisen poliittisen, oikeudellisen ja taloudellisen yhteistyön historiaa ja rakennetta. Oikeustieteen ja oikeuskielen erityispiirteitä esitellään sekä yleisesti että Euroopan unionin näkökulmasta. EU:n käännös-ja terminologiatyötä tarkastellaan artikkelissa sekä normittavan ohjeistuksen että käytännön työprosessin vaiheiden kautta. Keskeinen rooli prosessissa on Euroopan komission käännöstoimen pääosaston (DGT) kääntäjillä sekä juristilingvisteillä, jotka tarkastavat kääntäjien termivalinnat ja arvioivat pitääkö EU-käsitteet ilmaista itsenäisillä EU-termeillä (käsite-ja termiautonomia) vai voiko kansallista termistöä käyttää myös EU-yhteydessä. Artikkelin lopuksi nostetaan esimerkkien kautta esiin EU:n terminologiatyön käsiteautonomiaan ja synonymiaan liittyviä haasteita sekä pohditaan nk. tavaramerkkiajatteluun liittyviä uudenlaisia ominaispiirteitä. Jos eri ilmiöitä ei EU:ssa nimetä kaikilla virallisilla kielillä vaan ainoastaan englanniksi (esimerkiksi Common Agricultural Policy/CAP, Seventh Framework Programme/FP7), näkyvät vaikutukset sekä termistössä että vähitellen myös eri kielten arvostuksessa ja näkyvyydessä tavalla joka on vastoin EU:n monikielisyyden perusperiaatetta.
This paper aims at highlighting some of the challenges involved in translating legal texts as par... more This paper aims at highlighting some of the challenges involved in translating legal texts as part of the multilingual lawmaking process of the European Union. The author posits that it is the function of the target texts that makes the difference between legal translation as part of multilingual lawmaking and other types of legal translation. In multilingual lawmaking, the resulting language versions are the law, not just information about law applicable elsewhere. Since the different authentic language versions are the law, they must comply with the basic quality requirements for legislation, such as accessibility, predictability, and non-discrimination. This, in turn, has consequences for relating to the source text, both as regards terminology and drafting conventions. The joy and sorrow of the EU translator is found in working to strike the balance between fidelity to the source text, on the one hand, and the observance of these basic quality requirements for legislation, on the other. Drafting guidelines and the EN 15038 standard provide useful guidance in this delicate endeavour.
Resumen Si tuviéramos que presentar a nuestro personaje entrevistado a través de sus cualidades, ... more Resumen Si tuviéramos que presentar a nuestro personaje entrevistado a través de sus cualidades, diríamos que tiene la paciencia de un traductor, la agilidad mental de un intérprete, el rigor de un traductor jurado, la meticulosidad de un lexicógrafo y la visión integradora de un profesor. Bajo la apariencia de un comunicador nato se oculta una capacidad directiva que le lleva a tomar la iniciativa adecuada en cada momento...
Quality aspects in institutional translation, 2017
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house tran... more The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing. This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-for- purpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and ques- tions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text categories and the risks involved. In the implementation of the guidelines, there has been a perceived tension between the fitness-for-purpose concept and high quality, on the one hand, and between the fitness-for-purpose concept and the traditional fidelity paradigm, on the other. The paper analyses why this tension is only apparent and why the fitness-for-purpose concept better than the traditional fidelity concept caters for the needs of the institutional translation and multilingual law-making that takes place in the European context.