Interpretation: where do we stand after completion of the fifth enlargement? - Main contents

The accession of Romania and Bulgaria on the 1 January 2007 completed the fifth enlargement of the EU that had started in May 2004. After adding Irish as an official language on the same day, the European Union now works with 27 Member States and 23 official languages. The scale of its multilingual regime makes it unique in the world, and to some the extra work it creates for its institutions may seem, at first sight, to outweigh the advantages. But there are special reasons for it. The Union passes laws directly binding on its citizens and businesses, and as a matter of simple natural justice they and their courts must have a version of the laws they have to comply with or enforce in a language they can understand. Everyone in the Union is also entitled and encouraged to play a part in building it, and must be able to do so in their own language. Now that we are consolidating the position of the nine languages added in 2004 and have started to recruit interpreters for Romanian, Bulgarian and Irish, the time is ripe for a review of the situation so far.

Who is responsible for what in terms of interpretation?

One way of looking at the EU Institutions is to see them as hosting the most intense, ongoing political and technical conference in the world. The Directorate General for Interpretation (often known by its acronym SCIC [1]) provides interpretation in meetings arranged by the European Commission , the Council of the European Unio n, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank and other bodies and agencies of the European Union located in the Member States. DG Interpretation also provides a conference organising capacity to the Commission services. The European Parliament and the Court of Justice of the European Communities each have their own, separate interpreting service.

How is DG Interpretation organised?

DG Interpretation provides interpreters for 50-60 meetings each day in Brussels and elsewhere. Each working day, 700-800 interpreters are ready to help the delegations of the Member States and other countries understand each other.

The language arrangements for these meetings vary considerably - from consecutive interpretation between two languages, for which only one interpreter may be required, to simultaneous interpretation into and out of 22 or more languages, which requires at least 66 interpreters.

DG Interpretation employs over 500 staff interpreters as well as a large number of freelances on contract out of a total pool of more than 2800 freelance interpreters world-wide who have been accredited to work for the three EU interpretation services.

How many interpreters for "enlargement languages"?

The projections of the European Institutions in advance of the 2004-enlargement showed a need for, on average, 80 interpreters per new language per day for all institutions once the new languages are fully integrated - practically all to be trained by the future Member States. DG Interpretation would require about half of these while working to maintain an overall 50/50 hiring split between staff and freelance interpreters

DG Interpretation has shown that it is able to provide three full (22-22) teams of interpretation per day. There are four meeting rooms available for meetings served by DG Interpretation with the requisite number of booths to allow for full language coverage. Following enlargement, the Council has introduced graded interpretation priorities. Meetings at ministerial level as well as selected working groups have full coverage, while other groups have variable coverage, depending on requests by the Member States.

The plenary meetings of the Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee continue to work with full coverage. The Commission's Wednesday press conference has a full language regime, while the individual Commissioners' press conferences benefit from extended regimes. Commission working groups and committees work - as has been the practice for the past 20 years - with interpreter teams that cover the actual need for interpretation. The college of Commissioners continues to work with interpretation in three languages (EN, FR, DE).

What is the situation for the new languages?

The table below sets out all new language staff interpreters available to DG Interpretation and the total pool of accredited freelance interpreters available to all three EU interpreting services. At present, the most represented new language in interpretation is Polish with a total of 106 interpreters, taking permanent staff, temporary staff and freelances together. For the other new languages, with the exception of Maltese (see below), between 45 and 87 interpreters are available per language. It is clear that for many languages there is still a serious effort to be made in each Member State.

Overall view of new language interpreters available to DG Interpretation (February 2007) (permanent and temporary staff, and freelance)

Bulgarian and Romanian

On 1 January 2007, DG Interpretation had 3 Bulgarian and 3 Romanian interpreters recruited as temporary agents, starting in January 2006. Another 6 interpreters for each language have temporary contracts with the European Parliament. A further 38 Bulgarian and 42 Romanian freelance interpreters are available to be shared between DG Interpretation, the EP and the Court of Justice.

The first open competitions for interpreters for the two languages were completed before the end of 2006, for the first time ever before accession. Training in the two Member States continues.

DG Interpretation will recruit 4 successful candidates from the Bulgarian reserve list. With the current 3 temporary agents, DG Interpretation will have a total of 7 staff interpreters available plus a share of the freelance interpreters accredited to the Institutions.

A further series of freelance tests in Bulgaria is foreseen at the end of March 2007 for which there are currently 155 applications.

DG Interpretation will recruit 5 successful candidates from the Romanian reserve list. With the current 3 temporary agents (of which two passed the open competition), DG Interpretation will have a total of 6 staff interpreters available plus a share of the freelance interpreters accredited to the Institutions.

A further series of freelance tests in Romania is foreseen in early March 2007 for which there are currently 455 applications.

The situation as regards user demand for the new languages

The overall satisfaction rate of demand for interpretation is almost 90 %, varying from 100 % for the most widely used EUR 15 languages to 27 % for Maltese for which only a limited number of interpreters is available.

Only one month after accession, the overall satisfaction rate for the new EUR 2 languages Bulgarian and Romanian for January 2007 is already considerable at 86 % for Bulgarian and 74 % for Romanian.

Although available resources are still very limited, DG Interpretation is now committed to also providing interpretation from Irish in certain meetings in the Council and Plenary sessions of the EESC and CoR. The first meeting where Irish was spoken and interpreted was the General Affairs Council of 22 January 2007.

Efforts are on-going to improve these figures for all languages, but require time and the commitment of the Member States to keep up training efforts.

Satisfaction of demand in % for interpretation into new Member States languages at the Council of the Union - January - December 2006.

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  excluding Maltese

Maltese poses a particular challenge in this respect since the competitions for Maltese interpreters in 2003 and 2006 yielded no successful candidates and the number of freelance interpreters available is limited.

DG Interpretation has worked closely with the Maltese authorities to improve the situation, and conference interpreter training courses were organised at the University of Westminster in 2004-05 and at the University of Malta in 2005-06 and 2006-07. So far, 9 new Maltese interpreters have graduated and passed the EU accreditation tests.

What is the situation of Irish?

Irish became an official language of the European Union on January 1st 2007. Since the beginning of the year, Irish interpretation has been provided at meetings of both the Parliament and the Council of the Union with the assistance of the few freelance interpreters already working from the language.

The immediate recruitment possibilities for Irish will be known by the end of 2007 after completion of the on-going English language open competition which contains an Irish option. There are no accredited freelance Irish first language interpreters but 6 English language freelance interpreters are available to interpret from Irish into English. A group of 4 existing staff and freelance interpreters are currently being trained to add Irish, and a group of 5 student interpreters are being trained with EU financial support at Westminster University in the UK.

How do we find the interpreters we need?

Numerous awareness-raising actions have taken place in the new Member States and Candidate Countries. DG Interpretation assists their universities and interpretation courses in many ways: with curriculum advice during the planning stage, and, once the course is in place, with subsidies, bursaries for students, training for trainers, teaching assistance, and teaching materials. A postgraduate-type programme is considered to be the most appropriate way to train high-quality conference interpreters. The benchmark is the European Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI: http://www.emcinterpreting.net ).

All new Member States and Accession Countries now have postgraduate programmes, often as a direct result of DG Interpretation's endeavours.

The annual DG Interpretation-Universities conference is a forum where those involved in training all over Europe can meet. For full details, please see http://scic.cec.eu.int/europa/helpuniversities

A first series of inter-institutional open competitions for interpreters with the new languages was finalised in the last quarter of 2004 and each of the three interpreting services has been allotted a number of the successful candidates. A second series for senior interpreters has been finalised in 2006. 134 freelance interpreters were added to the inter-institutional accreditation lists in 2006 after 43 tests based on some 2.400 applications.In 2007, 27 inter-institutional accreditation tests are planned.

What are DG Interpretation's Internal training efforts

DG Interpretation is making a long-term investment in training, the results of which will come on-stream only gradually. 3 "old" staff have added a new Member State language at the end of 2006 and 8 "new" staff have added an old Member State language. Currently, 61 interpreters from EU-15 Member States (40 staff and 21 freelance) are following courses in the languages of the 12 "new" Member States + Irish, Croatian and Turkish. 33 participants in the training courses will be ready to add a language in 2007, and a further 23 are expected to add the language in 2008-2009.

 2 DG Interpretation interpreters + 1 European Parliament staff member are attending an Irish course. 8 interpreters (5 staff + 3 freelance) are following a Croatian course, and 10 interpreters (9 DG Interpretation + 1 European Parliament) are following a Turkish course.

How is the Commission preparing for the arrival of new languages?

DG Interpretation has engaged with all Candidate countries and drawn them into cooperation activities.

In November 2004, DG Interpretation started cooperation with Croatia, which led, in October 2005, to Croatia's first full-time postgraduate training course in conference interpreting at the University of Zagreb. The course is now in its second year and had a highly successful yield at its second accreditation test.

In 2006, DG Interpretation and the European Parliament's Interpretation Directorate visited Turkey, where two centres of excellence have been designated to cooperate with the EU Interpreting services. A first successful accreditation test was held.

In 2006, a first fact-finding trip to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia established that a conference interpreter course was about to start up and assistance, as indicated above, was provided.

What is the cost to the EU budget of interpretation?

The total cost of interpretation in the EU institutions was about EUR 195 million in 2006, the equivalent of EUR 0.42 per citizen per year. The annual cost of interpretation per citizen is not expected to rise significantly with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania and the addition of Irish.

For more information:

http://europa.eu/languages/en/home

http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/scic/index.htm

[1] DG Interpretation was known until 2003 as Service Commun Interprétation-Conférences - Joint Interpreting and Conference Service.

[2] Staff interpreters: recruitment under way are all currently freelances.

[3] Two Romanian Temporary staff to be appointed officials after passing open competition.