Vertaling: stand van zaken na vijfde uitbreiding EU (en) - Hoofdinhoud

In less than three years, the official languages of the European Union have more than doubled, growing from 11 on 30 April 2004 to 23 on 1 January 2007. The Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission boldly took up this extraordinary challenge, incorporating more languages in 32 months than in the previous 46 years.

In the run-up to accession, teams of linguists from the candidate countries translated and revised the Community acquis - some 90,000 pages consisting of the Treaties and secondary legislation adopted up to the day of accession - currently more than 300 volumes of Community legislation of 300 pages each. In Brussels and in Luxembourg new translators were recruited and trained to join their colleagues from the `older' Member States.

With the successful integration in 2007 of Bulgarian, Romanian and Irish in the growing family of EU official languages, the European Commission has once again shown that - far from being a barrier to the construction of a closer union of peoples - languages are indeed the cement of the European project and that the scary predictions of Euroskeptics were totally unjustified.

The enlargements of 2004 and 2007

The enlargement of 2004 was of course a tremendous challenge. Eleven countries with nine new languages become Member States in one go. As it could be expected, it took some time to get the community acquis translated and the new language units up and running in Luxembourg, but most of the problems have been rapidly solved.

On 1 May 2004 the Council adopted, at the request of the Maltese authorities, a derogation whereby, for a period of three years from that date, the European Union would not have to publish all legislative acts in Maltese in the EU Official Journal and couldn limit itself to translating the acts jointly adopted by the European Parliament and the Council. This derogation will come to an end on 1 May 2007.

Apart from Maltese, all other new languages rapidly fell into step with their older counterparts in DGT.

Taking full account of the lessons learned from the former enlargement, DGT prepared the ground for the smooth integration of Bulgarian and Romanian as of 1 January 2007. The first translators were recruited as contract staff as early as January 2006 to prepare the translation infrastructure and tools. Following further selection procedures for temporary staff, by the time the new Member States joined more than 30 translators per new language were working for DGT, some of them in its Field Offices in Sofia and Bucharest. Another 150 or so successful candidates are on the shortlists for each of these languages. These lists will be shared out between all the institutions and, over the next few months, additional translators will be recruited from them. During the first half of 2007 DGT should therefore be able to meet its target of 56 translators per language department.

Bulgarian

On 1 January 2007 a total of 31 Bulgarian translators were working with DGT, all as contract staff. The target is to recruit 25 additional translators by 1 March 2007. However, this will depend on several variables, such as the length of the administrative procedures and notice required.

The four assistants already in place should be joined by four more successful candidates by the beginning of March. Three further recruits are sought.

Romanian

On 1 January 2007 a total of 40 Romanian translators were working with DGT, all as contract staff. DGT target is to recruit 16 more translators by 1 March 2007. As with Bulgarian, the final result will depend on a number of variables.

Four assistants have been recruited as contract staff, one more will be in place soon and six more recruits are sought.

The case of Irish

The treaty has been available in Irish since the country's accession in 1973. It was only in 2005, however, that the Irish authorities asked that Irish be granted the status of an official EU language. Translation into and from Irish started on 1 January 2007, following the adoption of a regulation. Due to a derogation similar to the one requested by the Maltese authorities, for a transition period of five years only the regulations adopted jointly by the European Parliament and the Council and correspondence from and to the citizens will be translated into and from Irish.

DGT has established an Irish language translation unit and launched an inter-institutional recruitment competition in 2006. The responsibility of translating the rest of the acquis into Irish lies with the Irish government.

Irish translation will start in DGT with a team of five translators. Recruitment is a big challenge as the translator market is limited and the Irish authorities also need recruits. Nevertheless, on 1 January 2007 one translator, one assistant and one manager were in place. A second translator started at the beginning of February while a third should start work soon. It is expected that the final two translators will be in place within the next few months, at which time the unit will be up to full strength.

The competition for Irish-language translators yielded 19 successful candidates on the reserve list.

The regional languages of Spain

In December 2005, the Commission concluded an administrative arrangement with Spain on the use of Basque, Catalan and Galician in correspondence with the Commission. The arrangement is based on the conclusions adopted by the Council in June 2005 allowing the use in the EU institutions of regional languages which have the status of official languages on part of the territory of a Member State. The Spanish government has designated a body for translation from these three languages into Spanish and vice versa.

The Commission's Directorate general for translation

Specialised translation services exist in each of the major institutions and bodies of the European Union - the Commission, the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, the European Central Bank, the European Investment Bank and the European Ombudsman.

The Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission is by far the largest, its major translation task clearly linked to the Commission's `right of initiative' in the Community legislation and to its monitoring role. With a total staff of 2350 (1750 translators and 600 support staff), DGT meets the Commission's needs for translation and linguistic advice with respect to all types of written communication.

DGT is almost equally divided between Brussels, where most of the `old' language units were traditionally located, and Luxembourg, where the new language departments are hosted along with some units translating into the 11 pre-2004 languages.

For organisational purposes, DGT is divided along language lines, with a separate language department for each official language. The language departments are further divided into units specialising in particular subjects.

Within the language departments, translators specialise in translating documents dealing with particular areas of the European Commission's policies: agriculture, competition, financial and monetary issues, education and culture, employment, energy, environment, external relations, regional policy and many more.

In 2006, DGT translated 1,541,518 pages, 36% more than in 1996. Of these, 72% had been drafted in English (45% in 1997), 14% in French (40% in 1997) and less than 3% in German (5% in 1997).

Around 20% of the output is contracted out to free-lance translators. This applies, of course, to documents which are not legislative, politically sensitive, confidential or very urgent.

DGT uses a quality assurance system based on classifying documents by category. All translations that are intended for publication, whether done in-house or externally, are always revised. Translations requested for information or comprehension purposes only are revised if necessary.

Consistency in terminology is guaranteed by the use of translation memories and data bases of Community-relevant core terminology. For the new languages, these resources began to be built up at the time of translating the acquis communautaire.

To cope with the enlargements of the Union and keep costs under control while guaranteeing the highest quality standards, DGT adopted in December 2006 a new strategy. The main measures include prioritisation into core and non-core documents, restrictions on the length of documents and incorporating language issues within the policy-making process of the Commission. Other important elements of the new approach are web translation, balancing of internal and external translation work and closer cooperation between the EU institutions.

Costs under control

In 2007 the cost of translation in the Commission is estimated to be around € 302 million, corresponding to a cost to each citizen of around € 0.63 per year. Thanks to the measures adopted for limiting demand and improving productivity, the addition of three new official languages did not increase the cost to the public. In 2006 the total cost of translation in all EU institutions was estimated at around € 800 million.

Not just translation of legal acts

To ensure democracy and participation in the European Union, citizens and stakeholders must have access to basic information on EU activities in the official languages on the Internet. In addition to the language-specific departments, therefore, DGT now has created a cross-language unit specialised in web translation. Specialised translators assist other Directorates-general not only in translating existing web pages, but also in better structuring their message and adapting it to the new media.

Another unit offers linguistic revision for Directorates General where texts are often drafted in English and French by non-native speakers. On request, these texts are examined and if needed amended to ensure it is orthographically, grammatically and stylistically correct and linguistically fit for purpose, e.g. sufficiently clear to be understood by the target audience or to be translated into other languages

DGT also ` went local', as foreseen in Vice president's Margot Wallstrom's D Plan for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate. Some 50 translators currently work in Field Offices, located within the Representations of the European Commission in the capitals and main cities of Member States. They actively participate to its communication policy and ensure contacts with the translation industry, translation professions, national and institutions and the public at large.

To celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the signature of the treaty, DGT will launch a translation contest for school pupils for drawing attention to the importance of translation in the Union.

Looking to the future

For the translators recruited from the new Member States, DGT provides training in the most widely used languages (typically English or French), in the information technology environment and translation tools of DGT and in the subject matters dealt with by the Commission.

In a longer term perspective, DGT promotes the creation of a European Master's diploma in Translation, with a standard curriculum corresponding to the needs of European institutions, companies and organisations. This will be particularly useful in those new and candidate Member States where a system of translation studies is not yet fully developed.

Translators from DGT who learn new languages may also be sent as ` Visiting translators ' to universities of countries where that language is spoken to improve their skills and at the same time give classes on translation and on multilingualism in the European institutions.

The terminological work done in the European institutions is of great value for people working in Member States as well. This is why the interinstitutional IATE database - containing almost 1.5 million multilingual entries - will soon be made available to the general public.

To translate the vast amount of documents produced by the European institutions, DGT has adopted or developed some of the most modern technologies - from speech recognition applications to computer-assisted translation, using its enormous corpora or `translation memories' to ensure consistency of the output. These developments also contribute to the progress of the language related industry in Europe.

For more information on DG Translation : http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/

See also the Languages portal: http://europa.eu/languages/en/home