Multilingual translation of industrial relations practices in official EU documents: the case of Italy's Cassa Integrazione Guadagni

It is a given that contrasting institutional realities entails translation problems, since practices that are specific to a certain legal system might not have an equivalent in another one. This aspect is even more pronounced in the discipline of industrial relations (IR), where the terminology used is often the result of negotiations and collective bargaining between different actors. Yet, and barring some exceptions, the hurdle faced by translators when rendering foreign practices in this field has been somehow neglected by scholars of translation studies, particularly as the IR discourse has been frequently treated as a subgenre of the legal one. In order to fill this gap, this paper sets out to investigate the challenges stemming from rendering national IR concepts in a number of languages. To do so, the notion of cassa integrazione guadagni, a practice that is peculiar to Italy’s IR system, will be investigated to see how this institution was translated into English, French and Spanish in texts drafted by the European Commission.