Blowing the Whistle across Languages – Issues arising from the translation of Whistleblowing in Sustainability Reports produced in Italian and English

This paper sets out to exemplify the challenges arising from the translation of industrial relations concepts from English into Italian. To this end, a dataset was examined made up of a number of sustainability reports produced by companies, to see how the concept of ‘whistleblowing’ was rendered in Italian. The findings reveal that translators have employed different techniques to translate this concept, which pertains to industrial relations discourse, the efficacy of which varies considerably. The paper also reasserts the role of language and culture when comparing and contrasting industrial relations institutions cross-nationally, highlighting that industrial relations as a discipline has developed its own lexicon, which at times differs significantly from the legal one.