What it is
A heading names a unit of a text, a rubric names a field, a label names a box on a form. None is running text, and all are read as identifiers: the reader uses them to find a place rather than weighing the words.
Two populations, with different warrants. A heading inside an act is part of that act's own language version, settled when the act was adopted. A label on a prescribed form is settled by the instrument prescribing it, and printed before anyone fills it in. The second is the stranger, because a form built to cross borders carries its labels in several languages at once and expects none to be translated.
Two cuts. The sentence by which a document certifies itself belongs to the record on attestation, even under a heading. Where a label names a concept rather than a field, the term record keeps the name.
Where the fixity comes from
Two multilingual form regimes answer one problem in opposite ways, and the difference decides what a translator may do.
Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 makes the weaker instrument. Article 8(1) has the multilingual standard forms attached to the public documents they accompany, used as a translation aid, and given no autonomous legal value. The form helps a reader past a document that keeps its own force.
The Convention on the issue of multilingual extracts from civil-status records, signed at Vienna on 8 September 1976, makes the stronger one. Article 8 gives an extract the same value as one issued under the issuing state's domestic rules, and has it accepted without legalization in every state bound by the Convention. Around that the Convention fixes the document down to its typography: Article 4 requires Latin printed characters, Article 5 puts dates under the symbols Jo, Mo and An, and Article 6 requires the invariable wording and the key to the symbols on the front in at least two languages, one of them French, reserving the back for a reference to the Convention, any wording missing from the front, and a summary of Articles 3, 4, 5 and 7.
Two boundaries on that. Article 4 rules the characters the form is printed in, not the spelling of what is entered on it: a name and its diacritics are governed by Article 2 of the Convention (No. 14) of Berne, 1973, on the recording of surnames and forenames, held by the conventions section. The Vienna convention also has a successor, Convention (No. 34) of 2014, which leaves Berne alone.
Either instrument would have to be amended for any of this to move. How a label is set on the page, as against what it says, is notation and belongs with the conventions; the Regulation's annexes are graphical layouts, which is why no list of their labels appears here.
Consequences for translation
What the document is decides the work, and the document says so.
- An extract under the Vienna Convention is not translated but obtained. A rendering of one substitutes an unofficial text for a document that would have been accepted without legalization.
- A form under the Regulation displaces nothing, so the public document beside it still needs a translation. Which regime a client's paper falls under decides whether there is work at all.
- A heading inside an act is retrieved from the target version, not composed. One composed here is a heading no version prints, and later references resolve against nothing.
- Where a label has no counterpart, what replaces it describes the field rather than naming it, and should be visible as a description. Symbols are not language: Jo, Mo and An are marks, not abbreviations to be localized.
Examples
FR>NL
- Source: sous les symboles Jo, Mo et An, le jour, le mois et l'année
- Target: onder de symbolen Jo, Mo en An, de dag, de maand en het jaar
- Comment: Vienna Convention of 8 September 1976, Article 5, the authentic French text against the Dutch translation in the treaty database. The symbols cross unchanged while everything around them is rendered, because the Convention fixes them as marks and not words. A translator reading them as French abbreviations would have written Dg, Md, Jr.
EN>NL
- Source: Use of multilingual standard forms
- Target: Gebruik van meertalige modelformulieren
- Comment: Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, heading of Article 8, English and Dutch versions. The heading is retrieved from the Dutch act, where the form is a modelformulier. Composing one from the English invites standaardformulier, which the Regulation never uses.
EN>FR
- Source: Use of multilingual standard forms
- Target: Utilisation des formulaires types multilingues
- Comment: Same heading, French version, where the object is a formulaire type and the word standard does not appear. Each version holds one settled label for one object, so a document offering a French reader "the standard form" names nothing in the Regulation.
References
- Convention on the issue of multilingual extracts from civil-status records, signed at Vienna on 8 September 1976 (International Commission on Civil Status, Convention No. 16), Articles 4, 5, 6 and 8, authentic French text and the Dutch translation published in the treaty database at wetten.overheid.nl (BWBV0003621).
- Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 2016 on promoting the free movement of citizens by simplifying the requirements for presenting certain public documents in the European Union and amending Regulation (EU) No 1024/2012, Article 8, English, French and Dutch language versions.