Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Ana Cristina Castro Rodríguez

Ana Cristina Castro Rodríguez holds a BA in Law from the Universidad de Barcelona, Spain and a Law degree from Universidad de Carabobo, Venezuela. A Venezuelan Sworn Translator (1993), she also holds certificates in Legal Translation, in Translation and in Petroleum Law, and has obtained a Diploma in Advanced Studies from Universitat Rovira and Virgili in 2008. She has taught Legal Translation at a private university in Caracas since 1994 (currently Comparative Legal Institutions) and provides legal and translation services as an independent contractor to an international petroleum company in Caracas and to other private companies. She founded and is chair of the La Casa del Traductor (Translators House) since 2006, a private Venezuelan organization that recently sponsored an ATA (American Translators Association) certification exam sitting in Caracas and will be carrying out a conference next September 2009 on "Petroleum and its Language".

Translating petroleum, Venezuelan petroleum contracts executed during the Apertura process (1992-1998) and their subsequent legal reform (2005-2008)

Supervisor: Anthony Pym

Research Summary

Although Venezuela is a petroleum-producing country, very little research has been done on it from a translation or genre perspective. Research is related to some petroleum contracts for exploration and production providing for international arbitration executed by the Venezuelan national oil company with private international and national oil corporations from 1992 through 1998. These contracts were accompanied by an English translation. This period is known as the Apertura Petrolera or reopening of the Venezuelan oil industry to private participation. However, as of 2005 through 2008, the government implemented and applied its policy of full sovereignty over Venezuela's oil, thus canceling the contracts and converting them into Empresas Mixtas where the State holds a majority stake. As a result, international arbitration was prohibited, the use of domestic litigation and Spanish became mandatory, and new corporate organizations were created. The aim of the study is to investigate the impact of all these changes on legal genres, on the power relations of the parties involved, on translators and translations. For purposes of the research petroleum contracts and their translations are viewed as "intercultural intersections" (Pym 1998), but living intersections manifesting a socio-cultural reality, and genre is approached in its broader social context.

Conference Presentations

Participated at the Graduate Conference in Tarragona, June 2009.

Will be participating with The language of Venezuelan oil contracts (1992-2008) in September and October 2009.

Minor dissertation here

Research design here