Language problems

There is clearly a language crisis building up in the Com-munity. It started at the Court of Justice, where delays in publishing judgments in "European Court Reports" have long been attributed to inadequate translator capacity. This was attacked at the end of the Presidency of Judge Due by leapfrogging the backlog, and for a short time the publication gap was closed to some four to six months. The gap has now widened again to more than a year. The main cause of this is said to be insufficient translators. The Court’s requests for an increase in translation services are regularly turned down by the Council.

Now the malaise is hitting the Commission. For several years the Commission has not been publishing its antitrust decisions in the Official Journal (except for a few very important ones) but has made them available to private enquirers in the language in which they were issued. The reason was openly stated to be the delays in waiting for a decision to be translated into all the 11 official languages before they could be published officially. That particular hurdle seems recently to have been overcome as regards state aids decisions. For the last few months these have been published untranslated in the Official Journal in their original language. Thus we have seen in the purple English edition of the OJ texts in German or French or Swedish. The administrative burden of translation has even been cited by the Commission as one of the reasons for embarking on the reform of Community antitrust law now under way.

This creeping destabilisation is bad enough, and has led to impossible suggestions that the Community should abandon its attachment to language equality in favour of one (which?) or two or three or how many official working lan-guages, with the remainder kept for ceremonial occasions, as has happened with Irish. The Council of Europe has just English and French; EFTA indeed has just English, although it contains no English-speaking state. So it can be done -but only if it started that way. And for a universalist organisation which directly affects the citizen and the trader in its laws and its administrative and coercive actions, reliance on one or two languages would be elitist, undemocratic and unwise.

Hence the near panic at the prospect of the next round of enlargement and its accompanying doubling of the number of official and authentic languages. The problems are cost, availability of translators, revisors (treaty texts are full of translation errors), geometrical multiplication of source language/target permutations, but above all cost.