The European Union’s Multilingualism Policy

In 1958, there were just four official languages of the European Economic Community (which was the first iteration of today’s European Union, or EU): Dutch, German, Italian and French. These languages represented the languages of the first six countries to join the Community. Today, European Union membership has been extended to countries beyond typical Western European borders and now encompasses countries such as Latvia, Malta and Turkey. So, with the ascent of multiculturalism, there are far more official EU languages than the original six. For example, between 2004 to 2007 alone, the number of official languages increased from 11 to 23. This article will explore the mechanisms behind the European Union’s Multilingual Policy.

A cornerstone of any democratic organization as vast and diverse as the EU is language access. Given the sheer number of languages spoken across the 27 member countries, a solid multilingual policy is in place. This policy allows EU institutions to communicate with its diverse citizenry, and vice-versa.
The EU’s main language access effort is spearheaded by the Directorate-General for Translation, which is the central translation service of the European Commission. Other EU institutions and bodies– such as the European Court of Justice, European Council, European Parliament and Economic and Social Committee– each have their own in-house translation offices.

The Directorate-General for Translation within the European Commission is tasked with a prominent agenda: “to support and strengthen multilingual communication in Europe and to help Europeans understand EU policies” (europa.eu). To that end, EU citizens in the 27 member countries can use any of the following 23 official languages to communicate with the European institutions and bodies:
• Bulgarian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian • Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Irish • Italian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Maltese
• Polish
• Portuguese • Romanian
• Slovak
• Slovene
• Spanish
• Swedish

(Note: There are fewer official languages than member countries because some languages are widely spoken in more than one country.)

Similarly, because the EU institutions and bodies pass legislation that applies directly to everyone within the Union, these laws and directives must be available and disseminated in all 23 official languages. However, not all European Union documents are available in all of these languages; only legislation and policy of major public importance are brought to the Directorate-General to be translated. Other documents– such as correspondence between institutions/agencies and individual citizens, reports, audits, internal papers– are translated in individual languages on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, the translation effort is immense. The Directorate-General of Translation’s average output (number of pages translated) was 1.86 million in 2010 (europa.eu).

Within the European Commission, there are three languages that are always in use: English, French and German. All internal documents are thus written (and translated into) in these languages since mostly all of the diplomats, commissioners, journalists and bureaucrats speak a combination of these three languages.
A particular controversy looming over the Union’s multilingualism policy is the inadequate representation of several minority and regional languages at the EU-level. Catalan, Galician and Russian are the most widely used, yet non-official, EU languages. While some of these languages (Catalan, in particular) have official status within the member states and might even count more speakers than some of the lesser-used EU official languages, they are still not considered “official” by the European Union. Spain has been the most vocal advocate for regional language representation. Luxembourgish and Turkish language are also not counted among the official languages; however, unlike Spain’s pressure to include Catalan, neither Turkey nor Luxembourg are lobbying for official language status.

According to the EU′s English language website, the cost of maintaining the European Union’s multilingualism policy —i.e. the cost of translation and other language services— was €1123 million in 2005, which is 1% of the annual general budget of the EU, or €2.28 per person per year. Current figures are certainly much higher considering the introduction of new member countries and, subsequently, official languages in 2004 and 2007. Furthermore, the cost of multilingualism is expected to rise significantly along with the number of EU issues addressed by the Commission. European Union citizens do not seem to balk at these prospects. Perhaps it is believed that the cost of linguistic/cultural inclusion for all European Union citizens is priceless.

For an overview of our translation expertise, visit our legal translation service page.

Tags: economic development, European, german, government, international

Category: Business Translation