Drawing on the examination of a national-specific industrial relations
practice – Italy’s ammortizzatori sociali – this paper intends to provide an analysis
of the strategies put in place by translators at the European Union to render
peculiar concepts in English in official texts and to evaluate the translation
process outcome in terms of effectiveness and clarity of meaning. To this purpose,
a corpus of documents has been scrutinised that have been produced in Italian
and then translated into English containing the expression ammortizzatori sociali.
The findings of the analysis show that different approaches have been used by EU
translators to render this notion which give rise to distinct outcomes as far as
translation equivalence and faithfulness are concerned