Localising the European Union

Opening the gates to Central and Eastern Europe in the earlier part of this decade provided a huge stimulus to the nascent IT industries in those countries, unleashing substantial amounts of human resources, including highly-trained computational linguists who had hitherto been confined to largely theoretical work.

Western firms, particular software companies, keen to stake commercial territory in this virgin turf, extended their localisation efforts to include the many new language markets in this area. Turning to local specialists for linguistic expertise, they cultivated a flourishing linguistic engineering industry in these comparatively small and diverse countries.

Now, the prospect of its eastern neighbours joining the European Union is providing an additional significant stimulus to local language industries. While no official timetable has been released, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Estonia have (along with Cyprus) all achieved the necessary economic and political reforms deemed necessary by EU officials to permit accession negotiations to proceed.

Acquis communautaires
This stage of the lengthy accession process, explains Pavl¡na Obrov ;, of the Czech Coordinative Centre for Translation of EU Materials, is bringing national law in line with EU law. When Sweden and Finland joined the EU in 1995, that entailed translating some 60,000 pages of EU regulations, the co-called acquis communautaire.

Now, thanks to the untiring efforts of the EU's lawmakers in Brussels, Pavl¡na Obrov ; and her colleagues are wrestling with upwards of 80,000 pages of the EU Official Journal, (equivalent to some 200,000 sheets of A4 paper). A team of 35 translators is currently tackling the task in Prague, with support of the European Commission's Technical Assistance and Information Exchange office (TAIEX).

The Centre in Prague has developed a terminology database using Trados' MultiTerm, adopting the same structure as that of Eurodicautom, the European Commission's massive terminology database. Draft translations are stored in a Lotus Notes database, allowing lawyers to peruse the translations as they are produced. Eventually, the draft legislation will be made available to the public, most likely via the Web, for informational purposes.

Law localising
A task of this scale will have an undeniable impact on the translation business within these EU candidate countries, as it had in other new member countries. As Dimitri Theologitis, Head of the Computer Translation Aids Unit of the European Commission Translation Service (SdT) in Luxembourg, recalls, "when Greece joined the Community, we didn't even have a university-level degree in translation in our country. This, of course, has changed."

Dimitri Theologitis

Theologitis notes that no matter how many countries join the EU, European legislation will always be rendered in the new member's language, as its is considered a given for the laws of the Union to be in all the languages of its citizens. Or, to put it conversely, the people of Europe have the right to be governed by laws in their native tongues (with the exception of a number of regional languages, not deemed "official" languages, such as Basque).

An additional challenge is posed by one of the original pillars of European unity, the Treaty of Rome, which dictates that all the official languages of the EU are also its "working" languages (Gaelic is excepted). As the Union expands, this generous policy is proving painful, as Theologitis, and thousands of other translation professionals within the institutions of the EU, are duly aware.

While the Union's number of official languages will continue to grow, the Commission, notes Theologitis, is studying the possibility of altering the working language regime, possibly in conjunction with the long overdue institutional reforms needed ensure that decision-making remains viable on a governmental level. Until this time, however, each new working language will entail the need for a team of professional translators for that new language just at the SdT alone. For each language (except the big three -- English, French, and German), SdT has sixty in-house translators.

While the new languages are expected to play a very minor role as source languages in the document translation flow -- for example. today Swedish and Finnish only amount to some 7,000 pages a year each as source (out of a total of 1,200,000) they will of course receive the same volume as the other target languages.

Cultivating translation talent
All this means that the pre-accession gear-up to handle the acquis communautaire, and post-accession implementation of each new language as working language within European government is having a significant impact on the translation communities of the new member countries. According to Theologitis, some five percent of candidate translators are sufficiently qualified; this means that a sizeable pool of techno-savvy translation talent must be cultivated to fill the SdT's rosters.

This gives the European Commission a unique double-barrelled impact on the language industry: on the one hand through its substantial support of Research and Technology Development through its research programmes (and notably the new IST programme), and on the other through its own enormous administrative appetite for human resources and multilingual document technology support.

To cushion the impact of the vertiginous increase in language combinations as new countries line up for EU membership, the Commission is studying a variety of strategies, both organisational as well as technological including

• increased used of freelance translators,
• temporary translation and revision "field offices" in candidate countries prior to accession,
• increased use of translation technology, including term bases,
• translation memory, and machine translation.
• the use of relay or pivot languages,
• two-way translations, whereby a translator translates from his or her native language into a second language, subject to revision by a native speaker, hitherto not customary within the Commission.

40,000 pages to translate
On the other side of the fence, small companies like Hungary's MorphoLogic are thriving by ministering to their respective countries' pre-accession needs. With the support of the Budapest-based firm's dictionary server, MoBiDic, circa 100 Hungarian translators have embarked upon the translation of 40,000 pages of EU legal documentation into Hungarian. Upon completion of the project, the resulting term base will be published as a comprehensive English-Hungarian dictionary of EU legal terms.

Back in the Czech Republic, Jan Hajic and colleagues at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Charles University in Prague, long a haven of research into MT, have developed a translation system for two very closely related languages, Czech and Slovak. Hajic notes that what is essentially a word-for-word approach works well in this context, and the group has found at least one customer for its system within the software localisation business. Further down the road, when Slovakia readies itself for EU accession, their system could also be deployed for the EU legislative texts, as translated into Czech.

Further Information:

URL: European Commission Translation Service (SdT)