Brussels, 20/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday, the European Commission adopted two consultation documents and an action plan on preparing its linguistic services for enlargement with the aim of preserving multilingualism through cost management despite the predicted arrival of up to ten new languages in 2004. The Commission hopes to achieve this through various modernisation measures - improving planning and co-ordination between its services, setting up a permanent liaison between the linguistic services and their clients, making a better use of support staff, modern technology and external resources and cutting down the translation of draft documents. The Commission will now launch negotiations with the trade unions (up until the middle of February) on all part of its new proposals that will have an impact on working conditions, and will then announce its formal decisions.
The Commission confirms that all general legislative and regulatory documents will continue to be translated into all the official languages before being sent to the other institutions. It will also extending its current internal practice of examining documents using three or more language versions (the "oral procedure") and using the "written procedure" for occasions when it is legally obliged for more technical documents. The first version of the draft Communication on the simplification of the linguistic procedure recommended using a single language (English) when launching and concluding the approval procedure for important political documents by the college of Commissioners. This initial idea had met strong opposition from the French and German governments (see EUROPE of 14 August).
The Commission proposes a variety of measures that could be pursued to raise the productivity of the linguistic services while restricting the volume of work required of them and simplifying working methods. In the field of interpretation, last-minute requests requiring expensive external interpreters, or the late cancellation of meetings, "incur high costs", points out the Commission. It suggests appointing a person in each Service for co-ordination with the Interpreting Service (SCIC) and defining user profiles for interpreting requests. Time and effort are currently wasted in the transmission of documents which could be avoided through modern technology; while rather than simply translating into their mother tongue, some translators could also translate into "relay languages" (French, German and English). Teleworking will be tried out in 2002. Striking the correct balance between internal and external staff: "In the field of translation, distinctions must be made between documents central to the Commission's responsibilities, and those of a less fundamental character". "For translation, the SDT could set as an objective the increase in sue of external translators from 20% to 30% by 2005, to work on those documents which are not considered related to core activities". As for interpretation, a recent independent cost-benefit study ordered by the SCIC "has shown that the most advantageous split between staff and freelance interpreters is roughly 50/50. The SCIC will strive to maintain that balance".
All these measures should enable the Commission to limit the number of net extra recruitments to cope with enlargement. In the field of translation, it is estimate that some 110 extra staff (both internal and external) will be needed for each new language, instead of 165 were no efficiency measures to be taken. For interpreting, the analysis concludes that 40 new interpreters per language will be needed, of which 20 should be permanent officials, plus 40 administrative staff for the Service as a whole to provide organisational back-up.