Working by the Light of the Moon: The Translation of ‘Moonlighting’ in Multilingual Official Documents. A Review.

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the notion of ‘moonlighting’, which in industrial relations discourse refers to secondary employment performed in addition to the employee’s main job. As this concept might lend itself to different interpretations in English, the aim of this paper is to consider whether the ambiguous nature of this wording in source texts is also reflected in target texts, exploring how translators deal with it when rendering this concept in other languages. To this end, documents published by international institutions in English and their translations in French, Italian and Spanish were compared and contrasted, investigating the strategies put in place by translators to convey the meaning of “moonlighting” in other languages.