ABSTRACT
This chapter examines non-professional editing in the offices of a government department in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. As Canada’s only officially bilingual province, New Brunswick is mandated to produce all of its official documents and to offer services to the public in both English and French. The demand for translation within the civil service is therefore high, and translations are produced by qualified translators working for or on behalf of the government’s central translation bureau. Translation is almost exclusively into French, the language of the Francophone minority. What happens when Francophone civil servants choose to edit material produced by professional translators and, more importantly, what motivates them to modify translations that, according to them, are already of good quality? Through non-participant observation and analysis of over 20 semi-structured interviews with civil servants, I will arrive at a better understanding of the sociolinguistic tensions that oppose professional translators and civil servants. Why is it that in some instances, professionally produced translations are considered by civil servants to be “too formal” or “ill-suited” to the needs of the department’s clientele? What type of editing is deemed necessary by civil servants? And how is this perceived by professional translators and revisers?
