Brussels, 26/05/2004 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the European Commission took steps to resolve current shortcomings in translation. Translation backlogs today represent a volume of 60,000 pages, which is likely to reach 300,000 pages in three years if measures are not taken, the Commission explained, calling upon all services to make sure that text and explanatory texts are no longer than fifteen pages.
The Commission also intends to increase translation productivity by 40% by 2006, compared to 2003. Inter-institutional co-operation will be stepped up for "free-lance" translation, as will the development of joint terminological databases. The Commission believes that these measures "should help to catch up the shortfall by the end of 2006", once translation resources for the nine new languages are fully in place.
Texts which the Commission is legally or politically obliged to produce (draft regulations and directives, decisions on State aid, cartels and mergers...) will continue to be published in all languages. For internal documents, the Commission will stick to the "procedural languages", French, German and English. These measures will allow the Commission to continue to respect the principle of multilingualism during the transition period, which will be marginally longer than for the previous wave of enlargement. The Commission states that translation requests rose to 1.48 million pages in 2003, and that on average, they have increased by 5.3% over the last five years.
The Commission has already taken measures to address this problem, recruiting 214 internal and external translators in 2003 for the new languages (a figure which will rise to 376 in early September). However, it explains that, if the current trend in increasing requests continues, "we will need between 3,000 and 4,000 translators by 2010, rather than the 2,400 currently in our employ". The Commission is already aware that competitions organised to recruit new translators will not yield the 135 successful applicants per language the EU was hoping for. The Commission also points out that each wave of enlargement leads to transitional measures (two years when Swedish and Finnish were introduced).