It is a given that contrasting institutional realities entails translation
problems, since practices that are specific to a certain legal system
might not have an equivalent in another one. This aspect is even
more pronounced in the discipline of industrial relations (IR),
where the terminology used is often the result of negotiations and
collective bargaining between different actors. Yet, and barring
some exceptions, the hurdle faced by translators when rendering
foreign practices in this field has been somehow neglected by
scholars of translation studies, particularly as the IR discourse has
been frequently treated as a subgenre of the legal one. In order to
fill this gap, this paper sets out to investigate the challenges
stemming from rendering national IR concepts in a number of
languages. To do so, the notion of cassa integrazione guadagni, a
practice that is peculiar to Italy’s IR system, will be investigated to
see how this institution was translated into English, French and
Spanish in texts drafted by the European Commission.
