Fiona Dow, London,
UK
1. Introduction
Each successive round of enlargement has brought with it specific challenges in every sphere of activity in the European Union, and the expected accession of coun
tries from Central Europe is no exception. It does however coincide with a period of discontent and scepticism amongst the citizens and governments of established Member States as well as an increased awareness of a need for reform which is quali
tatively different from anything encountered in the past.
The European Union is searching for an identity and for a destiny on the interna
tional scene. Cooperation in the realms of foreign and security policy and in justice and home affairs, the question of the powers of the Institutions and their relation
ship with national parliaments as indeed the issue of overhauling the voting system in Council have been at the forefront of discussions within the IGC and have tended to overshadow the more prosaic practical aspects such as the future of multilingual Europe.
No official decisions have yet been taken within the Commission, the Council or the Parliament about the future. The following examination of options and strategies is therefore intended to be nothing more than a set of guidelines based on the exist
ing parameters and on the most recent experience of widening the language base within the Union.
In my paper, I will concentrate mainly on interpretation since this is the sector where the most serious difficulties have been encountered in the past.
2. Interpreters in the EU
Interpreters in the European Union either work for the Commission, which also provides interpreters for the Council, for the Parliament or for the Court of Justice.
2.1 Council Regulation
Council Regulation No 1 of 1958 lays the foundations of Community language policy.
• In Article 1 it defines the official and working languages;
• in Article 2 it states that a document may be forwarded to the institutions in any of the working languages and that a reply will be given in the same language;
• in Article 3 it stipulates that documents sent by the institutions to a member State shall be drafted in the language of that member State and
Section 1. Preparations for European Integration
• in Article 4 it specifies that Regulations and other documents with general appli
cation shall be translated into ALL official languages.
Whereas the concept of equality of official languages seems to have been adopted, the situation with respect to working languages is not so clear. According to statistics about the actual number of pages of text produced within the Commission during the first eight months of 1992 over 290,000 pages appeared in French compared with 210,000 in English; 40,000 in German, 5,463 in Danish.
2.2 The Parliament
Parliament which conducts most of its business in public, operates slightly differ
ently. Article 79 of the Parliament’s Rules of Procedure contains provisions governing use of languages: all of Parliament’s documents, including a full set of minutes of Parlia
mentary proceedings are to be translated into the full array of official languages; oral statements are likewise to be interpreted into all official languages and other languages may be covered at the discretion of the President, a power which has been applied in the case of Joint Parliamentary Committees with aspirants for membership with all that this implies by way of precedents.
In general terms, the Parliament has shown greater commitment to full language cover for all its meetings, whereas in the Commission three-three or six-six meetings with French, German and English forming the core, extended to Spanish, Italian and Dutch have been the norm. This mirrors the composition and function of the Institutions themselves.
The element of uncertainty prior to ratification of the accession agreements, espe
cially where the final outcome has depended on a referendum has in the previous cases thwarted attempts at long-term forward planning. Moreover, the decision on approval of official languages resides with the Council. In other words, the services’
hands are tied. Potential demand cannot be provided for in advance, even where acces
sion looms large. The net result of this can be summarised as “too little, too late”. In the past, reacting rather than pre-empting has been the order of the day.
The inherent inadequacies of the traditional approach have been acknowledged and Parliament has taken a series of initiatives, for example:
A memorandum issued this year lists the priorities for training activities, namely:
1. Swedish and Finnish;
2. enhancing proficiency in rarer community languages such as Dutch or Danish;
3. perfecting skills in major Community languages such as Spanish;
4. responding to the personal interests of individual interpreters.
Parliament organised and funded two courses held in August of this year, the first in Vásterás for interpreters with Danish intending to add Swedish; the second in Edinburgh for interpreters with Finnish as their native language to improve their Retour.
Whereas these measures may be characterised as remedial in nature, it is also true that the first batch of permanent officials appointed to the Swedish and Finnish booths were drawn largely from the pool of former trainees at the Parliament whose course commenced in the six months leading up to January 1995.
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We may conclude from all this that there is room for adapting to changing cir
cumstances once a shortfall has been established, but equally that pre-accession sup
port from the Institutions has left a lot to be desired.
3. The experiences of Finland and Sweden
In this context, the experiences of Finland and Sweden afford a valuable source of information for determining a strategy to smooth the transition to fully-fledged participation in the workings of the Union.
Both Finnish and Swedish are minority languages not generally used in transna
tional dealings. Hence there has up till now been no call for large numbers of inter
preters with an intimate grasp of the intricacies of an undertaking such as the Euro
pean Union. The primary problem for the two new booths has been a chronic short
age of supply of suitable and appropriately qualified individuals. In Finland, univer
sity-level interpreting training at the four establishments at which it was offered rep
resented 20 credits as part of a translation degree. Although it delivered enough graduates for the market as was, it was clear that it would fail to do so once Finland entered the EU.
In answer to this, a working group was set up in 1992 to carry out an estimate of needs. The political wrangling which subsequently broke out over whether the new facilities should be situated in Tampere or Turku was so embittered that the aptitude tests for the eight month intensive course were not held until August ‘95! - eight months into membership.
The Swedes did not have to battle against red tape to the same extent, as the Institute for Translation and Interpretation had been established at the University of Stockholm in 1986, offering training in conference interpreting modelled on the courses at the Copenhagen School of Business Studies. Nevertheless the stringent entry requirements and a lack of interest in interpreting as a profession amongst those likely to make the grade hampered efforts at attracting candidates.
3.1 The Finnish example
Add to this the complicating factor of the scarcity of pivots for these languages in other booths. With Finnish, the first non Indo-European language in the EU, there is an almost exclusive reliance on Retour. The average training period for a non-native speaker to acquire Finnish spans between 5 and 7 years. In view of the fact that time is needed by all new interpreters to learn the in-house jargon and procedural ropes, it appears well-nigh miraculous that chaos has not been the order of the day!
The second significant problem to emerge was that of terminology. In spite of the existence of a special unit composed of legal linguists and translators within the Finnish Ministry of Justice, responsible for translations of EU-specific terms within the framework of the E.E.A. Agreement, many of these were discovered to be quite simply incorrect by colleagues in the booths.
A second delegation was formed to translate the Treaty but rivalry between these two bodies was detrimental to the readability of the final document as ratified. Stylis
tic and syntactical flaws confuse and confound the task of understanding a text which has now been irrevocably enshrined in legislation.
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A further horror story concerns the Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, translation of which was entrusted to a trainee as a summer job and which was only intended as a stopgap solution. Unfortunately, the person concerned does not seem to have been fully conversant with parliamentary procedure, either Finnish or European, and wrongly transposed a number of terms from one tradition to the other. An amended version of the Rules is scheduled for the end of this year!
In the meantime, a practice of more effective coordination of effort between Par
liament translating and interpreting staff has evolved, albeit on a voluntary basis, with monthly meetings held in Strasbourg, during which lists of new and/or tricky terms appearing in the press and in meetings are discussed and proper Finnish equivalents are found. This is an idea which could well be copied by other linguistic groups.
Proposals for video-conferencing between representatives of Commission and Parliament services and the EU Temporary Translation Unit in Helsinki are in the pipeline and the general feeling is that a network of contacts with experts in Finland in the various technical fields would put an end to regrettable episodes such as those related.
In the opinion of members of the Finnish booth, valuable time during meetings could have been saved, had similar steps been taken at a far earlier stage, guarantee
ing an accurate set of equivalent terms for daily use.
3.2The Swedish example
The Swedish example is barely more uplifting.
In January 1994, the Delegation for the Translation of EU Legislation within the Foreign Office published a report entitled Swedish in the EU containing an analysis of working methods in Brussels and possible problems in asserting the position of Swedish as a working language.
The main conclusions of this report were that the huge quantity of texts to be trans
lated would lead to problems in ensuring a uniform benchmark for quality a prob
lem exacerbated by the lack of time available to keep pace with ongoing demands.
Since the source material itself was in many instances deemed to be needlessly cum
bersome, it was considered to be of the utmost importance that care be taken at the initial stages of dealing with a text to avert the nightmare scenario of being saddled for all eternity with an inadequate or even botched rendering.
With characteristic zeal, the authors set about trying to convert everyone else to their model, invoking the principle of subsidiarity to justify transferring responsibility for all translations to Stockholm, bypassing the service in Brussels altogether.
Contrast this with the later expert report destined for the use of the Swedish ‘96 Committee preparing the government line for the ICC. Taking stock of the situation one year into membership, a sobering picture of what had actually been achieved takes shape.
Based on a series of interviews with Swedish functionnaires within the Commis
sion and the Council as well as with delegates from business who had attended meetings in Brussels, it identifies impediments to the smooth functioning of the daily life of the Institutions.
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The most commonly voiced complaints are catalogued and may be summarised as follows: Swedish officials are put at a direct disadvantage by being excluded from access to interpretation. Passive and active Swedish could not be taken for granted, indeed only 13% of respondents had ever had interpretation provided for them.
4. Terminology within the EU
The absence of appropriate terminology was the next point raised, which echoes the Finnish lament. Progress is slowed due to documents being sent back home for purposes of consultation and revision to national authorities which do not have the resources to cope with the extra workload. On average, a document is shunted back and forth between Brussels and Stockholm five times before agreement on a text is finally reached. The wider implications for the Union as a whole lie outwith the scope of the present analysis, but it is obvious that as things stand the impact of contribu
tions and proposals from smaller Member States is dramatically reduced unless they are prepared to abandon their linguistic privileges.
Terminology within the EU may be divided into a few broad categories, the first of which is the fixed corpus of primary legislation embodied by the Treaties and the acquis communautaire, Community law which has already been enacted. Given that full acceptance of these provisions is an essential precondition to membership of the Union, it would be tempting to assume that their translation would not be much of a problem, though the examples mentioned above should suffice to make it plain that quality is not a foregone conclusion.
There are however grounds for hoping that improvements may soon become a reality. The Commission financed external translations of its White Paperon the Pre parations Amongst Associated Countries inCentralandEastern EuropeforAccession to the Single Market into all the languages of these countries. The Translation Service has put together an English-language glossary of key terms from this document, some 1,600 in total with definitions where necessary. An electronic version of this is avail
able now and the paper version will be ready by the end of this month.
The second category of terminology is more fluid, comprising the Regulations, Directives and Decisions which are under discussion and which in their final form will affect the daily lives of the 360 million who live in the Union. These encompass everything from cooling off periods for timeshare agreements through the hazards of radioactive leaks from nuclear submarines to the latest research on the transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. A glance at the names of the D.G.s at the Commission and the Parliamentary Committees should give an insight into the sheer breadth of areas of activity of the Union and about the bulk of terminology involved.
On a lighter note, an excerpt from my own working papers conveys the opaque
ness and absurdity of some of the more technical terms. JSIC’s documentation ser
vice has compiled a number of glossaries for internal use. Apart from the excellent Fisheries and Management Committee wordlists, the main flaw is lack of anything approaching full cover for the 11 languages, again leaving it to the conscientiousness of the individual interpreter to complete the work in his or her mother tongue and/or working languages. The service’s counterpart in Parliament is still in its infancy.
Section 1. Preparations for European Integration
5. The situation in Hungary
Taking our host country as an example, I would now like to highlight a few of the problems specific to the region. The days when the learning of Western languages was actively discouraged are long gone, 1989 being a watershed after which the situ
ation dramatically improved.
The advent of satellite television and the free if expensive availability of foreign language publications on the newsstands has allowed for far greater exposure to native speaker accents, regional variations in vocabulary and different linguistic reg
isters, though it still holds true that a Hungarian undergraduate will probably have had less first hand experience of his language than his contemporaries in other coun
tries.
A large number of universities and other schools in Hungary offer training in interpretation, but usually as a module in other courses as was the case in Finland.
The school at ELTE (TCTI - Training Center for Translators and Interpreteres) is an exception with post first degree tuition in interpreting and translating over two semesters. One of the strengths of the course is that it includes tuition in current affairs and international organisations, but there appears to be no test in simultane
ous interpretation in the final examination.Although students are encouraged to learn other languages, the schools don’t as a general rule train them in a second pas
sive language.
On the translation and terminology front, the picture is ominously familiar. Apart from the White Paper, work at translating Community legal texts has commenced, but again there are no cast-iron guarantees of quality. Background knowledge about the EU and its Institutions cannot be assumed amongst translators in spite of the increasing number of books on the subject in Hungarian.
Departments of European Studies are in the process of becoming established at the universities, but ignorance is rife amongst the population at large. As a result, teaching in modern history and politics should be compulsory for all budding trans
lators and interpreters. As is the case elsewhere, lawyers are far more likely to know about the EU than translators or interpreters and information about terminology work has not yet filtered down to all the interpreting schools.
A final problem for countries in the region is that of the practice of ministers and others travelling abroad with departmental linguists rather than employing qualified interpreters at commercial rates. This has not enhanced the reputation of the profes
sion. Indeed it has undermined the profession in that it has led to a reluctance to commit funding to the proper training of more than a tiny handful of individuals.
6. Conclusion
Armed with the benefits of the hindsight, a number of recommendations may be made.
Firstly, the importance of meticulous advance planning cannot be overestimated.
A last minute flurry of activity when the prospect of accession is imminent is counter
productive. Particular care must be taken in selecting the team responsible for the authentic version of the Treaty and revision/correction activities with legal linguists must be properly coordinated. Furthermore, a network of contacts with experts in
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the many different specialist fields should be established at the earliest possible stage.
This is necessary both as a means of establishing an accurate and reliable terminol
ogy base and also in the long term to minimise the pernicious effects of prolonged periods of isolation from the mother tongue environment amongst permanent staff, both linguistic and administrative, in Brussels and Luxembourg. “Pollution” from the host country language is a well-documented phenomenon.
Secondly, it would be unrealistic to assume that the future demand for Hunga
rian, Czech, Polish, etc. can be met in the short to medium term by interpreters in the established booths. To cite the example of the UK, access to teaching in these languages at school or even higher education level is virtually non-existent. Traditio
nally in the UK only French and German have been on the school syllabus, supple
nally in the UK only French and German have been on the school syllabus, supple