EU translation bill rises to €800m

Translation costs for the European institutions will soar by €258 million to €808m per year when the EU takes in ten new members in May.

Brussels today spends €550m on translating EU documents into eleven languages – and the spiralling costs post-enlargement will account for a further nine: Latvian, Estonian, Czech, Maltese, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and Slovenian.

Interpretation costs will rise from €105m in 2003 to €140m per year after enlargement of the Union.

EU officials on Tuesday said Turkish is also set to become an official EU language if talks to reunify Cyprus succeed and the entire island becomes a member state.

Figures released by the European Commission show ballooning linguistic and administrative needs after the accession countries become full EU members.

The volume of translation texts will increase by 40 per cent and 110 additional translators are needed for each of the languages.

Brussels has admitted there is a shortfall of translation candidates in the Baltic languages, Slovenian and Maltese.

For Maltese, a langauge spoken by just 400,000 citizens, only 90 maltese job-hunters have applied for the 135 translator posts - of which 50 did not even bother to turn up for the pre-selection tests.

The commission tried to justify the situation by saying preparation for the Maltese post only began in 2002 and that talks continue “with the Maltese authorities in order to help remedy” the lack of numbers.

But the use of new languages from eastern Europe will not extend to all EU documents; internal texts within the institutions will remain predominantly in English, German and French.

"English is the language spoken by most officials in the EU since the last enlargement," said an EU official.

The EU’s translation service, located in Brussels and Luxembourg, is the largest in the world – with a permanent staff of 1,300 linguists and 500 support staff.

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