The “Ce” Declaration of Conformity: when enterprises decide to translate official documents themselves

Resumen

There are several European documents concerning small and medium enterprises (SMSs) which do not have an official template of a “Ce” Declaration of Conformity document, due to the fact that every time that any of them is drafting a new one, the structure or content is never equal. The enterprise’s work is to arrange all the qualifications and characteristics of the item described following the intended instructions as detailed in EU legislation. This is the reason why the macroestructure of those documents is very similar, but no totally equal. As these documents adopt a similar format style, we can often find the translation in several languages in the same document. The fact is that translation plays a really important game here, since these documents are translated into several languages at a time, but the quality of translation changes from one language to another and from one document (made by one enterprise) to the other (made by another enterprise). We analyze the different mistakes found in the translation of “Ce” Declaration of Conformity documents in the language pair English/Spanish and try to describe to our best knowledge what these documents are for following the descriptive assessments from official EU legislations.