Nitobe Centre for language democracy
Language questions
FAQ - Translation/interpretation
How high are the translation and interpretation costs in EU members?
The proportion of the total EU budget accounted for by translation in all the EU institutions is estimated to be around 0.8%, which is about 13% of the administrative expenditure of the institutions (operating at full speed). Source
How many translators and interpreters work for the EU?
- Translators for the Commission: The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation is the largest translation service in the world. Located in Brussels and Luxembourg, it has a permanent staff of some 1 650 linguists and 550 support staff, and also uses freelance translators all over the world. Known as the DGT after its English initials, the service translates written text into and out of all the EU's official languages, exclusively for the European Commission. Interpretation of the spoken word is the responsibility of the Directorate-General for Interpretation. Source
How many A4-pages are produced every year due to translation in the EU?
In 2004 output from the DGT was 1 270 586 pages. Of this, 77% was done in-house and the rest by freelances. A page is 1 500 typed characters not including spaces. Source
How does translation and interpretation work in the EU?
- On a day-to-day basis, the European Commission uses three working languages — English, French and German. Draft policy papers and draft legislation are produced in one or more of these languages. Only at the final stages are the texts translated into all 20 official languages.
- The European Parliament, which often needs to produce documents rapidly in all official languages, has developed a system of six ‘pivot’ languages. The six are English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish. A document presented in, say, Slovak or Swedish will not be translated directly into all other 19 languages. Instead it will be translated into the pivot languages and then retranslated from one of them into the others. This removes the need for translators able to work directly from Maltese to Danish or from Estonian to Portuguese, and hundreds of other combinations as well. If texts were translated directly from all official EU languages into all the others, this would give a total of 380 bilateral combinations.
- By word of mouth EU interpreters use a similar system when providing full interpretation to and from all 20 official languages. For instance, a Finnish speaker’s words will be interpreted into a limited number of ‘relay’ languages. A Slovenian interpreter, for example, will plug into one of these as the source language, removing the need for people who can interpret straight out of Finnish into Slovenian.
- Using linguistic shortcuts of this kind makes practical and economic sense – provided standards are maintained. Quality control of both interpretation and written translation is therefore a major activity.
- Interpreters also provide slimmed down services for informal and working meetings. In some cases, only the most widely known EU languages are used. In others, participants may be able to speak a larger number of languages but these are only interpreted into two or three of the widely used ones. The idea here is that speakers are free to express themselves in their own tongue, or a language they feel comfortable in, while it is assumed they have enough passive knowledge of a major EU language to follow the rest of the proceedings in that language.
How do members of the EU parliament experience translation and interpretation services?
Please view the response on the separate page.
