The public debate about the language policy of the European Union is a regular feature on the cultural pages as well as in the editorials of the big national newspapers in several of its member countries. As the expected dates of the next enlargements draw slowly nearer, this debate has taken on a new impetus here in Sweden, where the fact that our country now holds the Presidency helps to raise media interest in EU affairs. I would therefore like to start this presentation with a few words explaining why we believe translation within the European Union is necessary - and will continue to be so as the gigantic project of creating a united Europe goes in to its next historical stage. The ultimate goal of the European Union is "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen" (to quote Article 1 of the Treaty on European Union). The aim is to promote economic and social progress that is balanced and sustainable, to assert Europe's identity on the international scene and to introduce a European citizenship for the nationals of the Member States.
Another provision of the Treaty, laid down in Article 6, is that "The Union shall respect the national identities of its Member States". The European Commission and the other institutions of the European Union exist to serve the EU and its citizens, a community of peoples with a fascinating variety of customs, characteristics - and languages. The very first Treaties, though, set no rules on language matters - still less did they lay down any policy of multilingualism. All we had was a brief provision to the effect that: "The rules governing the languages of the institutions of the Community shall (...) be determined by the Council, acting unanimously." (quoting Article 217 of the EC Treaty, or Article 290 in the consolidated version.) So, when the Treaties of Rome entered into force on 1 January 1958, the very first Regulation adopted by the Council of national ministers (which was - and still is - the supreme law-making body of the European Union) addressed itself to the official languages and working languages to be used. This Council Regulation No 1, which constitutes the legal basis for multilingualism within the EU, has never been changed in substance, only updated with every new accession, as new official languages have been added. At the outset in the 1950s, there were six Member States: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Between them they had four official languages: Dutch, French, German and Italian. Today, after the most recent accessions in 1995, the European Union has fifteen Member States: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom and eleven official languages. So Article 1 of Council Regulation No 1 now reads: “The official languages and the working languages of the institutions of the Community shall be Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.” Languages and Democracy It is fair to ask why we need so many official languages. Why can't we manage with a smaller number, like the United Nations, NATO, the OECD and other international organisations? The answer is simple: the European Union passes laws and those other organisations don't. People cannot be expected to comply with laws if they cannot understand them. The word "Union" denotes a much deeper level of integration than the intergovernmental cooperation taking place in organisations like the UN. The European Union aspires to be a "Union of Citizens". Its institutions produce legislation that applies directly to all citizens in all the Member States and must therefore be expressed in their official languages. So it is a legal obligation arising from a practical necessity. But it is also vital to democracy that Community legislation should be available to Europe's citizens in their own languages, as a guarantee of equality before the law. Ignorance of the law is no defence, so the law cannot be imposed on anyone in an incomprehensible foreign language. Danish farmers, German industrialists, British barristers, French wine growers, Swedish civil servants and everybody else must always have access to the European legislation which affects them. And they must each have access to it in their own language. Where a dispute arises, Community law takes precedence over national law. The means of public access to Community law - and the place where many of our translations is published - is the Official Journal of the European Communities (renamed the "Official Journal of the European Union" in the Nice Treaty of December 2000). The Official Journal is the only periodical published every working day in all the official languages of the European Union. But The European Union institutions are not there just to churn out regulations. Article 21 (third indent) of the EC Treaty lays down that every citizen of the Union may write to any of its institutions or bodies in one of the official languages and have an answer in the same language. This provision was introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty, which was signed in 1997 and entered into force on 1 May 1999. It constitutes a clear reinforcement of the principle of multilingualism, since this is the first time it has been enshrined in the Treaty. Before Amsterdam, a similar provision was to be found in Article 2 of Council Regulation No 1 of 1958. Its purpose is to give equal treatment to all European citizens regardless of their mother tongue. Another new provision introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty and now contained in Article 255 of the EC Treaty, says that: "Any citizen of the Union (...) shall have a right of access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents." This also has obvious implications for translation; accessibility implies providing a version in a language the citizen can understand. Translation in the EU So, now you know why the European Union - to be democratic - needs its translators, although I should highlight that none of the official texts I have mentioned above specifically refer to translation, or, for that matter, interpretation. Article 4 of Council Regulation No 1 talks of “drafting in 11 languages”. This is not a conspiracy to reduce translators’ visibility; it is simply the logical consequence of the principle that all the official languages have equal status. There are other logical consequences of this principle, too, in our organisational structure and the costs involved. I am not going to bore you with too many facts and figures but, to answer some of the questions frequently asked in this context, let me take you through the present state of affairs and then show you how we are preparing the ground for the entry of several more official languages. All the European Union institutions have their own in-house translation departments. On this chart you can see the number of full-time translators currently working for the various organisations, each of which has its own specific characteristics and specialities. There is also a separate organisation called the Translation Centre for Bodies of the European Union, which is at the service of all the decentralised agencies and other bodies that do not have their own in-house translators. The Translation Service of the European Commission, which I represent, is the largest one. It is, in fact, as far as we know the largest translation organisation in the world, with approximately 1 250 translators plus support services. Two thirds of us are based in Brussels and one third in Luxembourg. Between us, we translate around 1.2 million pages per year, always into our mother tongue. The texts include a large variety of documents such as legislation proposals, legal instruments for publication in the Official Journal, working party reports, press releases, letters, speeches and texts intended for the general public. Contrary to popular belief, however, we do not translate ALL documents into ALL the official languages. Certainly, all laws and many outgoing documents have to be translated into eleven languages because they are of general application and have to be published. But the situation is different for incoming documents like reports from Member States and correspondence from national authorities and individuals, sent for processing within the institutions. It may be sufficient to translate these into one language purely for information purposes (and that is usually English or French, since more people in-house have those as at least their second languages than any other). Common sense dictates that translations should only be produced if they are needed. We translate a wide variety of very technical texts on subjects ranging from nuclear safety to anti-dumping or artificial insemination. Within the Commission’s Translation Service we specialise in a number of fields and translate full-time within our area of specialisation. To help translators acquire their special skills and knowledge, we are provided with facilities including documentation, terminology databases and research, training courses and contacts with national experts in the field. We all have a university degree in either languages or other subjects like law, sciences or economics, and sometimes a combination of both. To qualify for recruitment we have to pass a rigorous examination. A proportion of the texts, at present around 20 percent, are sent out to freelance translators. The standard of freelance work is ensured and monitored by means of a severe selection procedure with regular calls for tender and close supervision. With the possibilities gradually opened up to us through technical progress, we can now establish increasingly close connections with our freelance partners and give them access to terminology bases and translation tools that will help them maintain high standards and work with us effectively. I will come back to this point later on, as our relationship with out freelances will become even more important with future enlargements. We also have our own staff developing translation tools and advanced terminology search systems. Through this continuous development process our work is gradually being rationalised and improved. You may have heard it claimed that machines will soon be able to take over the role of human translators within the EU institutions. It's an attractive notion to an accountant, but I would suggest you forget that myth as quickly as possible. A machine has no feelings, no emotions, no tastes, no interests - it can never experience anything for itself or take an educated guess. But it does have its uses for purely mechanical work, and, you are most welcome to find out some facts about the practical uses of language technology in our demonstration zone display, where my colleagues will be happy to show you the latest developments in this area. The Cost of the Official Languages Talking about myths versus facts, I would now like to approach the controversial subject of the costs of translating and interpreting between the official languages. It is often claimed that working in eleven languages devours a huge proportion of the EU budget. In panel debates or newspaper articles you may sometimes find shocking figures like “half the administrative budget” or “25 percent of the staff” being put forward. Now, for those of you who like figures I can provide you with some authentic ones from 1999. In that year, the total cost of the interpreting and translation services for all the institutions combined was € 685,9 million. Divide this by the population of the European Union, which is about 370 million, and you get a figure for the annual cost to each citizen of less than € 2, which is about the price of a cup of something in a café. This figure will not change much when more languages are introduced, since there will always be an increase in population and taxpayers when a new country joins. The cost of translation and interpreting every year is less than 1% of the total budget for running the EU institutions and all the Union's policies. The rest is spent on implementing the policies themselves, in areas such as agriculture, external aid, jointly funded research projects, and cooperation on justice and home affairs. Language Consequences of Enlargement Let us now move on to talking about the future. As you know, the future has already begun and, as things stand today, there are no plans whatsoever to carry out any major changes in the European Union’s language policy. In the Intergovernmental Conference leading up to the Treaty of Nice, a Treaty whose main purpose was to prepare the institutions for future enlargements, the language question was never an issue. Nor has it been put down as an issue for the post-Nice discussions about the future of the European Union. For the Translation Service of the European Commission this state of affairs has a number of implications: For every new Member State from among the present candidate countries, one additional official language will be added to the eleven we have already. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all have their own national languages, although some of them are even more closely related than Swedish and Danish. In Malta, English is the official language, but the national language, Maltese, is constitutionally important. Cyprus is officially a bilingual country with Greek and Turkish as its official languages. Greek is already an official EU language but Turkish is not. Working with all eleven languages might sound like a nightmare - not to mention 23 or more languages in the future - but it is simply a matter of organisation. The EU institutions have already shown that they can function reasonably well despite these constraints. Organising translation for the enlarged EU is admittedly more straightforward than organising interpreting. You will probably hear more about this from Mr Benedetti of the Commission's Interpreting Service later on this afternoon. As far as translation is concerned, coping with enlargement simply means finding enough well-trained translators and having a well-organised system of workflow, with maximum use of computer-aided tools and discipline on the part of translation requesters (who need to write less, write more clearly, and plan ahead to allow enough time for translation). I’ll come back to these points later on. And remember, we have been through this all before. With previous enlargements we have acquired considerable experience in this field, as the number of official languages has gradually increased from four to eleven. Preparing For New Languages Let me take you briefly through the various stages of the preparations for the admission of new Member States and new official languages, more or less following the model of the most recent enlargement, when Finnish and Swedish were added to the list. The enlargement ahead is such a massive undertaking, however, that we will have to adapt this model to a realistic level. Considerably more imagination and flexibility will be applied to solving the problems than ever before, and certain “sacrosanct principles” may well have to be set aside. In fact the linguistic preparations for accession start well before the actual negotiations. Some of the present candidate countries started as far back as 1996. The first step is the translation of the so-called acquis communautaire, that is the EU legislation in force. It consists of primary legislation, mainly the Treaties, secondary legislation and the most important parts of the case law. This is, as you can imagine, a massive undertaking involving tens of thousands of pages of complicated texts which have to be translated, revised, authenticated, adopted by the council of the European Union and finally published in a special edition of the Official Journal. and responsibility for carrying it out lies with the governments of the countries applying for membership. Each applicant country has set up a special unit to translate the acquis into the national language. The structure and funding of these Translation Coordination Units or TCUs vary, but they have all been aided by the Commission's Technical Assistance Information Exchange office, known for short as TAIEX. This office is also responsible for organising translations into English or French of those parts of the national legislation, which need to be checked by the Commission for conformity with EU law (the process known as screening). In the final phase of the membership negotiations, the translations of the acquis produced in the applicant countries are revised by the institutions. The lion's share of these revisions will be done in the applicant countries, by teams of revisers employed by the Commission and attached to the Commission’s delegations in the respective countries. This formula relies heavily on new technology and telecommunications. One of the major advantages is that of proximity to the national unit that produced the translations of the acquis and the opportunity for feedback and close cooperation. It is also useful to have a team of translators on the spot who can build up contacts with national universities and professional associations, to create networks for information on recruitment of future translators for the EU institutions. Simultaneously, the translation services of the EU institutions and bodies all have to prepare to provide translations out of the new languages that will become official languages when new countries join. Training existing staff to translate out of more languages normally meets these new translation demands, and training has to start well before the new countries join. Learning a language takes several years, but translators always welcome the opportunity to add new languages to their portfolio, and this willingness is exploited to the full. Since 1996, 150 translators at the Commission (and proportionally equivalent numbers in the other institutions) have been taking courses in Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish and Slovene. Courses in the languages of the other applicant countries are in preparation. Translators are also encouraged to attend intensive courses in the countries concerned. Apart from providing language training, the translation services have to prepare for enlargement by adapting their computer systems and computer-aided translation tools to cope with new languages. The software and hardware such as keyboards must be able to support the alphabets and accented characters of the new languages. These problems will be minor compared with the great challenge that had to be met in 1981 - that of integrating the Greek alphabet – at a time when computer systems were far less sophisticated than they are today. A very important area is terminology development. When the translators start work in Brussels and Luxembourg, translating into the new languages after the accession of a new country, they must have well-stocked and reliable terminology bases, and these can only be created by close collaboration from an early stage with the translation centres in each applicant country. Last but not least: recruitment. Recruitment of translators is the most important part of preparing the translation services for enlargement. Taken together, the institutions will need more than 200 translators for each language (not including interpreters). New Approaches The different institutions have different needs. The Court of Justice needs translators with a legal qualification as well as excellent languages. The European Parliament, Economic and Social Committee and Committee of the Regions will be looking for translators capable of translating out of any of the official languages; while the Commission's and Council's prime need is for translators able to translate out of French and English, which are the main drafting languages in those institutions. For the first time, we may also be seeking translators who are, in addition, able to translate out of their mother tongue into English or French. This would mean abandoning, for the first time ever, the principle that translators should never translate into a language other than their mother tongue. Practical reality may require us to loosen up on certain rules and allow certain categories of documents to be translated with some compromise on style, but documents produced in this way would only be used internally by the institutions, and then only as a way of getting a basic understanding of a text. . This kind of translation can be compared with the daily drafting in English and French that is being done by civil servants with other mother tongues at all levels of the organisation. Universities offering translation courses in the applicant countries are encouraged to contact the EU institutions. TAIEX arranges study visits and round tables on many topics. The translation services themselves have taken on substantial numbers of trainees from the applicant countries for short periods, usually in the terminology department, where they are trained in our working methods and generally made familiar with the workings of the translation services. To summarise all this, the acquis has to be translated and revised before accession. Then the Union's translation needs have to be met after accession, which involves translation out of new languages (with training for existing staff) and translation into new languages (with new translators being recruited). But these activities occur concurrently, not consecutively, starting several years before actual accession, as the table below shows:
| BEFORE ACCESSION
| AFTER ACCESSION
| year X-4
| year X-1
| year X
| year X + 1
| Acquis
| Translation starts national ministries TCUs.
| in or
| We start to revise; authentication. September: start Special OJ publication
| Special OJ published; acquis becomes national law.
| Business usual.
| as
| Translation
| We
| start
| We continue
| We
| start
| Business
| as
| out of new languages.
| training in-house translators.
| our
| training.
| translating of the languages.
| out new
| usual
|
| Translation into new languages
| Training universities.
| in
| We hold exams for recruitment.
| We recruit the first translators for the new languages.
| We continue recruiting until business can run as usual.
| | | | | | | | | | |
As I said at the outset, we believe that the multilingual policy of the EU is here to stay. We know that we can cope with it from an organisational point of view. But if we mean this seriously, there will have to be certain changes in the way we work as European institutions. We need to rationalise if we want to ensure that translation is not a factor that slows down the important work of turning the political visions distilled in the treaties and at summit meetings into reality. What will this mean in practice? To start with, there will need to be changes in the original documents sent for translation, as regards both their quality and their quantity. The Translation Service has campaigned for years for a higher standard of drafting, including rigorous application of what we call the KISS rule (Keep It Short and Simple) enshrined with other guidelines for clear writing in a campaign known in its English version as "Fight the Fog". Mid-term, we will also probably have to look into laying down stricter priorities as regards which documents absolutely need to be translated into all the official languages. Secondly, if translating out of the mother tongue is introduced, it will involve devising a new classification system to establish which categories of document can be treated in this way. The proposal under consideration is that translations out of the mother tongue will be allowed only for internal documents and then only for information purposes. Considerable efforts are also being made to make optimum use of the free-lance market as a means of coping with new source languages and to reflect changes in translation methods. New ways of working with free-lance translators are being developed, on the basis of long-term relationships, closer co-operation, increased support, better supervision and partnership. The third area for change is training and recruitment. As we have seen, more than 10 percent of the Commission's staff translators are now learning one or more of the languages of the candidate countries on a voluntary basis. The institutions are taking action to ensure that enough translators learn the new languages, increasing the range of languages on offer and encouraging more translators to enrol. The institutions also hope that the budgetary authorities will grant additional funds for intensive language training in the countries concerned. An idea being considered for the future is to adopt a more flexible recruitment strategy and possibly also open up some temporary posts. Facing The Challenge Right, so we know what we have to do. We have done it before and we can do it again. In fact, we are well on our way. Clear and reliable texts, which everyone can understand are vital to transparency, open government and democracy. So we will do whatever it takes to meet the new challenges and make our contribution to maintaining multilingualism within the European Union, the word "multilingual" has taken on a meaning that goes beyond its dictionary definition of "speaking or using many languages", or "written or printed in many languages". For us, multilingualism is a fundamental principle with the extra meaning of "equal rights for all official languages". To put it bluntly, the average citizen in any Member State is not interested in knowing that the Union functions in many languages. People want to know that it speaks their language - and listens to them in their language. Language is one of the most important parts of a person's individual entity. What is more, the languages of Europe are part of its immense and diverse cultural heritage, and should be cherished as perhaps the chief distinguishing feature of national identity too. These truths were recognised by the Union's founding fathers all those years ago - now they have been written into the Treaty itself and are one of the Union's non-negotiables. So we not only can cope with more than 11 languages: we must. And we will. The author thanks her colleagues Emma Wagner, Svend Bech and Jesús M. Martínez for permission to quote material from the draft of their forthcoming book “Translating for the European Union institutions”, to be published by St Jerome Press, Manchester, UK.
Author: Kristina Cunningham
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