Before I get into what it is like going through the process of becoming an auktoriserad translator, let’s start with the basics: what authorisation means and why it matters.
An auktoriserad translator, or “authorised translator” in English, has met the high standards set forth by Kammarkollegiet (the Swedish Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency) and is thereby authorised to carry out certified translations. These can be necessary for documents that are part of various legal proceedings, such as citizenship, divorce, adoption, contracts, visa applications, and so on, where more than one country or language is involved. Companies encounter the same requirement in more everyday circumstances – in some cases, articles of association or annual reports need to be certified before they can be filed with various authorities. In Sweden, this is a skyddad yrkestitel or “professional title protected by law” that can only be used once certain stringent criteria have been met.
The official title in Swedish is auktoriserad translator rather than, as one would normally expect, auktoriserad översättare. The opposite applies for our colleagues in the interpretation industry, who are awarded the title auktoriserad tolk rather than the loanword auktoriserad interpreter. Note also that the work of an auktoriserad translator can be referred to as either an “authorised translation” or a “certified translation” in English – both terms circulate in the industry.
For the sake of clarity in this article, let’s assume that an authorised translator carries out certified translations. I’ll stick to that terminology going forward.
It should also be noted that the work produced by an authorised translator is not, by default, a certified (stamped) translation. If the translation in question needs to be certified, that needs to be explicitly stated by the customer during procurement.
To be clear from the outset: I am in favour of keeping the requirements for authorisation as demanding as they are today. That rigour is precisely what makes the protected title mean something, both to the customers who rely on it and to the profession itself. What follows is a mix of hard facts about the process and my own personal experience of going through it.
The authorisation process
The process to become an authorised translator in Sweden is hardly a walk in the park. It consists of a translation test, held once per year by Kammarkollegiet, and sitting the exam will set you back upwards of three thousand Swedish kronor.
Once upon a time, the exam consisted of three completely offline test translations: a legal text, a financial text and a general text. No online resources or collaboration allowed; you had to schlep your collection of niche dictionaries and terminology guides with you and hope for the best as you fought your lonely battle of words. Aspiring authorised translators turned up with suitcases full of reference books and built fortresses of printed matter around themselves. Some grace has since been extended: as of 2020 the test consists of only two translations (legal and general), and applicants are allowed unfettered Internet access.
That leniency has its limits, though. The standards remain just as rigorous – a certified translation should be formulated so that it can be translated back into Swedish and result in something identical to the source text, a quality-assurance process with the unimaginative name of “back translation.” It still often takes a translator multiple attempts to pass, and there’s now an extra instance of gatekeeping in the form of a civics and reading comprehension exam. It’s multiple choice, which helps, but the subject matter covers an unbelievably wide breadth of public life in Sweden in addition to the finer points of best professional translation practices. The advantage held by native Swedes when it comes to the former is only minimal; there’s no escaping the need for hours of study. Any authorised translator who’s been minted as of the year 2020 has also had to pass this additional exam. At the moment of writing, I’ve assembled over 100 pages of notes from reviewing their recommended study material.
There’s definitely some good that has come out of all those hours of studying, in addition to helping me become as prepared for the exam as possible. I’ve been able to answer questions and resolve problems posed by actual Swedes. I was able to direct a friend to the Swedish Bar Association’s Advokatjouren service when a coworker of hers needed legal advice; I could encourage my sambo to file a complaint with ARN, the National Board for Consumer Disputes, over a faulty laptop. “ARN? What’s that?” he asked when I first mentioned it. I learned the difference between utvisa and avvisa, between a verk and a myndighet. How is a new law introduced in Sweden? Which courts hear which appeals? In a fair world, these will all be pub quiz questions one day and I will absolutely dominate the competition.
What does this matter for a business?
I should preface this section by saying that the most important qualities of an authorised translator are apparent long before the state finally awards them the protected professional title. Even the mere process of preparing for the exam is a valuable learning experience that can have a profound, positive impact on how a translator works and the texts they produce. In other words, when I say “authorised translator” here, it should be taken as a shorthand for a translator engaged in the process of becoming authorised. And the most important thing for businesses when it comes to authorised translators boils down to that metric I mentioned above: applying back translation as a quality-assurance metric, to ensure word-by-word precision and economy.
When you’re publishing financial and sustainability reports to reach stakeholders in multiple languages, it’s important that every translation of any given document not only be internally consistent within itself, but also consistent with the other translations and – most importantly – the original. The same information needs to be in all versions, no more and no less. An authorised translator is trained to treat that kind of precision as the baseline, not the exception – checking a figure against every other place it appears, rather than translating each document as if it exists in isolation.
Being an authorised translator also means you are sensitive to jargon and technical expressions – not that you have them all memorised, but that you can recognise when something might be a technical term and that you know exactly where to go looking to find it. The importance of the right terminology in statutory reports, contracts and so on is highly visible: it makes sure your company looks informed and professional regardless of language, and in some cases it can keep you out of legal trouble. That much is self-evident. But this mastery also has other benefits that aren’t as immediately apparent just from looking at the final product. Musicians learn songs by heart not only because it smooths out the logistics of any given performance, but also because once you have the piece memorised you start thinking about it and engaging with it at a different level. That’s where the flair, the expression, the creativity comes in. The same holds true for translators: while it would be absurd to ask us to memorise a text or vocabulary list before we sat down to work, the easier it is for us to find the right word, the more time we can spend on the quality of the translation. Just because a translation meets the standard for certification doesn’t mean it has to sound ugly or unnatural!