Spanish Translation Unit - Post B: Translation and clear language

The Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD) provides the European Parliament with translation services for its written or electronic communication in all official languages of the European Union.

Our mission is:

• To make available in all official languages all documents relating to Parliament’s role as co-legislator and one of the two arms of the budgetary authority, in order to ensure the legitimacy and transparency of the legislative and budgetary process of the European Union;
• To enable the European Parliament to meet its commitment to the policy of multilingualism, designed to ensure the equal treatment of languages and permitting all citizens of the European Union to communicate with the institutions and have access to the documents of those institutions in their own language;
• To support the Members of the European Parliament and its administration in their multilingual communication with citizens by providing high-quality, modern, multilingual services in text, audio and video and ensuring that content is clear and in all the official languages of the EU;
• To ensure that all these services are supplied as efficiently and effectively as possible.

As a shared trainee working both for the Directorate for Translation and for the Directorate for Citizens’ Language, you will have the opportunity to carry out a wide variety of linguistic tasks.

Your working time will be divided between the two directorates.

• During your time in the Directorate for Translation, you will be working for the Spanish Translation Unit, translating formal texts relating to the European Parliament’s legislative work and other core activities into Spanish.
• During your time in the Directorate for Citizens’ Language, you will be administratively attached to the Audio Capacity Unit but will in practice belong to a cross-unit pool of intercultural and language professionals, which is responsible for all linguistic tasks in 24 languages. You will be working on a variety of products intended for the general public, such as press releases, newsletters and podcasts, and will have the opportunity to subtitle audiovisual material into your mother tongue. Depending on the projects the Directorate-General is working on during your time here, you may also be asked to adapt or modify texts in various formats, for example audio files and website content, and possibly record podcasts.

In both directorates, you will work under the supervision of a translator-mentor, who will guide you, teach you the current workflows and procedures, and revise your translations and other linguistic work as necessary. This will give you the opportunity to hone your linguistic skills  and draw the greatest benefit from your traineeship. 

As a prospective translation trainee:

• You have a perfect (native-speaker equivalent) command of Spanish;
• You have an in-depth knowledge of English and a very good knowledge of at least one of the other official EU languages;
• You possess strong team-working and communication skills, which will enable you to work as part of a team of translators and translation assistants;
• You have experience with, or are keen to learn how to use, CAT tools, especially SDL Studio.

If you are interested, please upload a motivation letter in Spanish summarising your educational background, your professional experience and your motivation to apply. The motivation letter should not be longer than 600 words. Please also upload all the necessary justifying documents (expediente académico universitario completo (con notas), certificados oficiales de conocimientos de lenguas, experiencia profesional) within the same file, i. e. first you create a single file and then you upload that single file composed by the cover letter together with all the documents you wish to include in PDF format.