Translating in a national institutional setting such as the Italian Ministry of the
Interior poses unique challenges to in-house professional translators as they endeavour
to convey the “voice” of the public administration to a large and diverse
international audience of practitioners and private citizens who interact with the
Ministry for various reasons on a daily basis. Starting from an overview of foreign
language services provided by the Ministry’s staff linguists, this paper focuses on
translation services and explores in detail text types, clients and readership and
the special challenges represented by L2 translation along with the strategies and
practices adopted by staff translators to cater for the specific translation needs of
both central and peripheral offices of the Interior Ministry. To illustrate all this,
the two authors have drawn extensively on their own daily experience as staff linguists
within two different structures of the Ministry, namely the Criminal Police
Directorate in Rome and the Police Headquarters of Gorizia, offering a number of practical examples of translation of Italian texts into English, their L2 and the preferred choice for almost the totality of the Ministry’s communication needs.
