Painting a portrait of Swiss federal in-house translators: a job announcement and survey-based inquiry into their diverse tasks and competences

Research on legal and institutional translators’ competences and evolving profiles abounds, but no studies on the Swiss Confederation exist in this field. This paper aims to characterise the typical profiles, in terms of tasks and competences, of federal translators by combining a corpus analysis of 250 job announcements with a survey of 229 participants from various federal language services. The findings show that federal translators translate and revise a plethora of text genres, including legal but also informative texts, and perform a variety of other tasks such as language consultancy and editing of original texts. In doing so, federal translators bring significant strategic and methodological competences into play, as well as linguistic and cultural competences. Thematic competence is essential but can be acquired on the job. Interpersonal and instrumental competences are important auxiliary competences. Regarding the latter, CAT tool skills are the most frequent requirement. These findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on the evolving profiles of language professionals working in the legal and institutional field, and how training should be adapted to reflect real institutional practices and needs.