Interpretation the challenge of Enlargement,

Brussels, 17 February 2004

The European Union is the most intense, ongoing political and technical conference the world has ever seen. The Directorate General for Interpretation provides quality interpretation in meetings arranged by the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank and other bodies and agencies of the European Union located in the Member States. DG SCIC also provides a conference organising capacity to the Commission services. The European Parliament and the Court of Justice of the European Communities each have their own, separate interpreting service.

How is interpretation organised?

DG SCIC provides interpreters for 50-60 meetings each day in Brussels and elsewhere. Each working day, 700-800 interpreters are ready to help the delegations of the Member States and other countries understand each other. The language arrangements for these meetings vary considerably from consecutive interpretation between two languages, for which only one interpreter may be required, to simultaneous interpretation into and out of 11 languages, which requires 33 interpreters. Full interpretation between 20 languages requires at least 60 interpreters. DG SCIC employs 450 staff interpreters as well as a large number of freelances.

Catering for such language arrangements requires the use of all the various simultaneous interpretation techniques and regimes we regularly apply: direct interpretation, relay, two-way interpretation or retour, and asymmetric language coverage.

Preparation for Enlargement

Number of interpreters required

DG SCIC's projections show a need for, on average, 40 more interpreters per new language per day. DG Interpretation now operates with a 47/53 hiring split, that is 47% staff and 53% freelance interpreters; in order to almost double the number of languages available we would need on average to fill up to 20 posts per new language added, leading to an approximately 40% staff increase.

Cooperation with the new Member States concerning training

Numerous awareness-raising actions have taken place in the Enlargement Countries, and the Directorate General for Interpretation has been building up in-house capacity in the new languages since 1998. These preparations will continue well beyond 2004 and 2007.

A postgraduate type programme is considered to be the most appropriate way to train high-quality conference interpreters. The benchmark is the European Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI :

www.emcinterpreting.net ).

All Accession Countries now have postgraduate programmes, often as a direct result of DG SCIC's endeavours.

DG SCIC assists the universities and interpretation courses in many ways: with curriculum advice at the planning stage, and, once the course is in place, with subsidies, bursaries for students, training for trainers, teaching assistance, and teaching materials. The annual DG SCIC-Universities conference is a forum where those involved in training all over Europe can meet.

For full details, please see

http://europa.eu.int/comm/scic/interpreter/assuniversities_en.htm

Interpreter recruitment

Apart from extensive information activities, DG SCIC has held annual tests in practically all the new Member States for the past four years. Interpreter training has to be timed well, because if you start training too early, the interpreters will lose their skills before they see action; if you start late, numbers will be too low at accession.

DG SCIC estimates that most of the new Member States have got enough interpreters to start with after intensive awareness-raising activities on the part of the Commission in the new Member States. The Commission is better prepared in terms of number of interpreters available on day one than for any of the previous enlargements, but for many languages there is still a serious effort to be made to bring up the numbers of highly qualified conference interpreters.

A first series of inter-institutional open competitions for interpreters is under way. The Commission expects to be able to hire up to 75 staff interpreters in 2004 and a total of 180 before 2007. The rhythm for each language will vary according to the results of the competitions, but all successful candidates will enter the reserve lists. The competition for Maltese interpreters in November 2003 yielded no successful candidates. DG Interpretation is in touch with the Maltese authorities in order to help remedy this situation. For the other countries, the outlook for the competitions is currently as follows:

Internal training efforts

Currently, 56 interpreters (48 staff and 8 freelance) are following courses in the languages of the 10 new Member States and in Turkish. 11 participants (staff) at the last [???] level are expected to have added the language by the end of 2004, and a further 5 by the end of 2005

How much is it all going to cost?

The total annual cost of DG Interpretation in 2003 was € 105 million, or € 0.28 per citizen of the Union. At cruising speed after Enlargement, with 40 intepreters per new language per day, the total cost of DG SCIC will increase to about € 140 million, or € 0.31 per citizen.

Setting priorities in interpretation

Starting from May 2004, DG SCIC has confirmed that it will be able to provide three full teams of interpretation per day. It is foreseen that from May 2004 there will be five meeting rooms available for meetings served by DG SCIC with the requisite number of booths to allow for full language coverage. Council is currently setting its interpretation priorities for the periods after Enlargement. Meetings at ministerial level as well as selected working groups will have full coverage, while other groups will have variable coverage, depending on the requests by Member States. The plenary meetings of the Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee will continue to work with full coverage. Commission working groups and committees will as is current practice work with interpreter teams that cover the actual need for interpretation. The college of Commissioners is scheduled to continue working with interpretation in three languages.