Translating NATO's prose : A study on applied strategies when translating specialised terms in the context of international relations

International relations as well as multilingual organisations and institutions rely upon translation. In this particular field, translators are mostly concerned with different types of specialised documents, such as legal acts, technical reports and press statements. Due to the high precision and clarity requirements that are associated with these texts, terminology appears to be one of the most difficult aspects when it comes to translating specialised documents. This difficulty is the main focus of this study. More specifically, the aim is to describe and analyse how equivalents of specialised terms in the source language can be found in the target language and to study translation strategies that can be applied when translating international relations terminology. In order to obtain the primary data used in the study, NATO’s new strategic concept from 2010 was translated from French to Swedish. The concept is supposed to guide the organisation during a ten-year period. Throughout the translation process both lexical and textual sources were used. The analysis was made in the light of different translation theories and models, which include Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1977) “direct” and “indirect” translation techniques, as well as Cabré’s (1992) theories and methods on terminology. The results show the complexity of the subject, and most importantly, that parallel texts, that is to say specialised documentation, can play an important role when it comes to translating specialised terms, since many of them are not to be found in ordinary dictionaries