A translation approach to CE declaration of conformity documents: common translation differences found in EN-ES documents

Abstract

There are several European documents concerning small and medium enterprises (smes) which do not count with an official translation template into several languages at a time. This is the case of one of the most employed documents amongst international enterprises: the CE declaration of conformity documents. The enterprise’s intention towards the usage of this document is to arrange all the qualifications and characteristics of an item described following the intended instructions as detailed in EU legislation. It is true that many enterprises do have these kind of documents translated into several languages, but they do not follow any official template made by any EU organization, and that makes even more difficult for translators (and for enterprises) to look for a “model” to base their terminological proposals. In general, the macrostructure of this type of document, once translated into different languages, is very similar, but no totally equal. As these documents adopt a similar format style, we can often find the translation in several languages in the same document, separated by slashes and not in a new drafted document aside. Although it is very common to find the translation made like that, the quality of translation is not assured: in the major part of the cases, the slashes only separate the original word from its corresponding literal translation into the TM. We analyze the different mistakes found in the translation of CE declaration of conformity documents in the English/Spanish language combination and describe what these documents are for following the instructions as defined in EU legislations. We offer, as well, our own proposal of EN/ES translation basing our results in both printed and computer-based real corpus.