Three common myths about multilingualism

Myth 1: All EU documents are translated into all the official languages.

This is not true. Certainly, all laws and many ‘outgoing’ documents do have to be
translated into all the official languages, because they are of general application and have
to be published (Articles 4 and 5 of Council Regulation No 1. quoted above). But the
situation is different for ‘incoming’ documents of the type mentioned in Article 2 of
Regulation No 1 - reports from Member States and correspondence from individuals, sent
for processing within the institutions. It may be sufficient to translate these into one
language for information (usually English or French), since all Eurocrats know English
or French or else they learn them - fast. Common sense dictates that translations should
only be produced if they are needed.

Myth 2: Multilingualism absorbs a huge proportion of the EU budget.

The proportion is not huge. In 2007 the total cost of interpreting and translation services,
for all the institutions combined, represented 1% of the total EU budget. This is equivalent
to €2.35 per year for each member of Europe’s population. About the same as a couple
of newspapers.

Translation and interpreting form part of the administration budget, and

administration absorbs only a small percentage of the total EU budget. The rest is spent
on agriculture, infrastructure, external aid, jointly-funded research projects, etc.

(Sources: European Parliament Committee on Budgetary Control, Report dated 8

June 2007 on Special Report No 9/2006 of the European Court of Auditors concerning
translation expenditure incurred by the Commission, the Parliament and the Council);
‘The European Budget at the Glance’; both available online on the Europa server.)

Myth 3: It would be easy to reduce the number of working languages.

The political significance of multilingualism and the difficulty of altering the language
regime should not be underestimated. It is always possible to introduce unofficial
restrictions in exceptional circumstances: for example, it is rumoured that the Members
of the Commission are capable of communicating in English when the topic is so
confidential that the interpreters have to be sent out of the meeting room. Likewise, all
Eurocrats are required to work in English and/or French, regardless of their mother
tongue. Unnecessary translation and interpreting can often be avoided by informal
arrangements. However, all proposals for formal reductions in the number of languages
have been rejected by the Member States, because of national sensitivities and also for
the legal reasons outlined above.

The same is true of attempts to introduce a distinction between ‘official

languages’ (for legislation, etc.) and ‘working languages’ (for use in meetings). At
present there is no official distinction between the two (see Article 1 of Council
Regulation No 1 quoted above). In the European Commission, we do use the expression
‘procedural language’ to refer to English, French and German, because those are the
languages in which documents have to be provided before they can be adopted at a
meeting of the Commission. The other ‘non-procedural’ language versions must still be
produced, but for a later deadline, usually after the meeting. However, the concept of
‘procedural languages’ has no basis in legislation or the rules of procedure.

When representatives of the Member States are discussing EU legislative

proposals, they expect to have all the language versions, and political incidents may occur
if they are not available.