Translation guidelines and style guides for quality assurance in institutional legal translation : Focusing on Korean translation of divisional units in international agreements.

This study highlights the importance of official translation guidelines and intra-and inter-institutional style guides for quality assurance in Korean legal translation institutions. As specifications required by ISO 20771, translation guidelines serve as benchmarks for quality assessment and control, as well as for ensuring accountability among translation participants. Institutional style guides, meanwhile, go beyond editing and formatting instructions, by attaining legal, linguistic, and technical quality assurance. Specifically, they regulate the consistent naming and cross-referencing of structural elements within legal texts, thus ensuring clarity in interpretation. Drawing from the practices of the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) and other EU legal translation institutions, this study examines the key components of translation guidelines and style guides for legal translation institutions. Additionally, a case study involving 10 Korean versions of international laws reveals inconsistencies and disorganization in hierarchical levels and cross-referencing expressions, underscoring the necessity of developing style guides to address these issues.