The changing profile of the translator profession at the European Central Bank

Abstract

The translator profile at the European Central Bank (ECB) has evolved in-creasingly rapidly over the past years. Staff of the linguistic services moved from their traditional set of tasks - translation, editing and proofreading, of-ten done on print-ups or in plain Word documents - to dealing with a multi-tude of tasks, such as project management, procurement, recruitment and training, and lately cultural mediation. But the real game changer in this transformation has been the quantum leap that technology applied to trans-lation (computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT)) has enabled in complex organisational structures. This brought about signifi-cant challenges in terms of people and change management, but also pre-sented huge opportunities and the chance to broadcast the ECB’s language services as a cutting-edge professional unit within the organisation. The transformation is still underway, but we are not in uncharted waters any-more. In fact, we are broadening our interest in new technologies to make our communication more accessible, even beyond the pure translation func-tion.

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