Die Kirche im Dorf oder die Regierung im Wald lassen

The most convincing way to answer the question why Translation Studies matters is to point to the practical benefits TS-results or reprocessed field experience offer in handling practical translation tasks. TS provides translators on the job with help for decision-making and problem-solving. A permanent difficulty when translating news for radio broadcasts lies in the names of organisations such as political parties, associations and institutions of all kinds.In my article I will discuss this issue, specifically for the language pair Finnish-German. For example, what can be done with ‘Suomen Ääni- ja kuvatallennetuottajat’, the name of a Finnish association for record industry products that could – at least in principle – be translated word by word. In theory, translators have a wide range of possibilities: for instance, they can transfer SL words directly into the target text, or invent new expressions. However, in practice, they are usually not free to choose. Instead, they have to look for precedents or check for existing translations in use. A procedure depicting the process of finding possible solutions is presented in the form of a decision tree.