You will be part of the Legislation Division in the Directorate General Legal Services. Our staff are responsible for preparing the ECB’s legal acts in the official EU languages, for drafting legal documents and ensuring their legal, linguistic and terminological consistency, and for publishing and disseminating the ECB’s legal framework and other legal publications. We are currently focusing on ensuring legislative quality, developing our doctrine relating to ECB legal acts and exploring ways of working more efficiently. We also play an active role in facilitating interinstitutional cooperation in the legal revision field.
In your role as Principal Lawyer-Linguist, you will be part of a team of lawyer-linguists and responsible for coordinating legal revision work relating to the German language, setting high standards of linguistic quality for German legal translations and advising on general principles to be applied when drafting legal acts.
To further enhance the diversity of our team, we particularly encourage applications from female candidates.
Your role
As Principal Lawyer-Linguist you will:
- provide linguistic advice on German language, terminology and style in relation to ECB legal acts, other legal documents, and litigation involving the ECB, national central banks, national competent authorities, other EU institutions or bodies, or third parties, which may include representing the ECB in external fora in which such issues are discussed;
- develop and implement quality control measures for the Division’s output of German legal translations, ensuring high standards of linguistic quality;
- establish templates and procedures for services performed by the Division in relation to German legal translations;
- take responsibility for researching, establishing and enforcing style conventions in relation to German legal translations and ensuring consistency between legal acts and other documents and within subject areas handled by the Division;
- coordinate specific German and banking supervision-related legal translation projects and advise on general principles to be applied when drafting legal acts;
- help to allocate scheduled and unscheduled work and, together with the Heads of Section, help to ensure that the Division’s workflow procedures run smoothly;
- translate draft ECB legal acts and other legal documents from English into German and revise German translations of ECB legal acts and other legal documents;
- maintain collaborative relations with colleagues in the Directorate General Legal Services and experts from other business areas with a view to ensuring efficient planning and organisation of the Division’s workload;
- participate in the procedure for recruiting staff and procuring consultants (e.g. interviewing and assessing candidates), in particular for the German language.
The position offers you excellent opportunities to contribute to the quality of German legal translations, which is particularly important in the banking supervision area. You will be part of a multicultural team that strives for continuous innovation to make a positive impact on the lives of European citizens.
Qualifications, experience and skills
Essential:
- a mastery-level command of German, which should be the applicant’s main language;
- a mastery-level command of English;
- a master’s degree in German or Austrian law;
- ideally five years of proven professional full-time experience in translating legal, financial or economic texts from English into German;
- good knowledge of EU law and/or financial law;
- an intermediate command of at least one other official language of the EU.
Desired:
- professional experience in translating legal, financial or economic texts from German into English;
- professional experience as a (freelance) lawyer-linguist, preferably with an EU institution;
- experience in successfully coordinating the tasks of a team of highly qualified staff;
- familiarity with or professional experience in using translation memory software, such as SDL Trados Studio, and/or a terminology management package, such as SDL Trados MultiTerm.
You engage collaboratively with others. You pursue team goals and learn willingly from other people’s diverse perspectives. You signal any need for change by explaining it and proposing alternative solutions. You analyse complex information effectively and can evaluate different views to arrive at solutions. You know and anticipate stakeholder needs. You are skilled at encouraging people to develop their abilities and are able to build up high-performing teams.
Working modalities
To enable the Division to maintain its business continuity capability, you will occasionally be expected to perform work during non-standard working hours and work at the ECB’s standby sites.
Further information
The recruitment process for this position may include remote written exercises at the screening stage and – if you are invited to participate further in the selection procedure – an on-site written exercise, presentation and panel interview.
Application and selection process
Find more information under “How you can join us”:
