Switzerland
The highest possible quality is paramount in all government communications, and this is even more the case when a country has more than one official language. Switzerland has four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh, the first three of which are official languages at the federal level. After Canada and the JIAMCATT organizations, Switzerland is the country with the largest number of government bodies using MultiTrans in the world.
The Swiss Amt für Sprachen- und Rechtsdienste (Language and Legal Services Office) is situated within the Chancellery of State in the Canton of Bern. The Office is responsible for the linguistic quality of every important document produced by the Bernese government, including those translated in other ministries. In fact, the policies on linguistic services within the Bernese administration specifically state that the Language and Legal Services Office is the centre of linguistic competence.
MultiTrans plays a central role for the Office in ensuring that the translations of any given document match linguistically, in other words, that the translations accurately express the content of the originals, regardless of the source and target languages. This is especially true in legal documents that frequently quote precedent texts.
Exactly how MultiTrans is used differs from translator to translator at the Office because each translator has their own personal working style: some employ MultiTrans as a text-mining tool, whereas others prefer it to be their entire translation environment. MultiTrans intrinsic flexibility facilitates this freedom of usage for users, while centralizing the core linguistic assets in one place so that consistency and quality are optimized and securely maintained.
Click here to download Canton Berne's Case Study.
