Translator recruitment falls below target

By Tim King

Date: 22/07/04

THE recruitment of translators by the European Union institutions to cope with nine new languages has fallen below target, while a backlog of work to be translated is still accumulating.

Results from the recruitment competitions to supply translators for the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers are now complete for seven of the nine new languages.

For all the languages but Maltese the three institutions together hoped to see 135 translators for each language come through the recruitment tests. Because of the difficulty in recruiting translators, before Malta's accession, a three-year period of grace was agreed to phase in full translation into Maltese.

But the recruitment of Slovenian translators has proved very difficult with little more than 10% coming through the competition. The numbers of Latvian and Lithuanian translators are also low.

A Commission official said: "None of the competitions has yielded 135. For most languages, it is about 80-90. For some it is below 50."

The Commission alone wanted to have recruited 50 translators in each language by the beginning of next year. So far it has acquired ten in each language.

The Council secretariat is also under strength. A Council spokesman said that 15 translators per language had been deemed "the minimum necessary" with 25 per language the optimum. At present, the Council had as few as seven to nine translators for some languages, he said.

The pace of getting translation work done depended on the slowest language, he pointed out.

But he said that the completion of the competitions meant that the Council would be recruiting permanent staff from 1 August.

The Commission's translation service is concentrating on "items where the Commission has a legal obligation and a deadline", a Commission official said.

"It is this area for the moment that absorbs our capacity. Much else is waiting for translation," he said.

After negotiations between the institutions, the Council and the Parliament have agreed to take on some work that would more usually be the Commission's. The replies from the nominated European commissioners to questionnaires submitted by MEPs will be translated by the Parliament rather than the Commission.

Gérard Bokanowski, director-general of the Parliament's translation services, said: "The Commission doesn't have sufficient capacity in the new languages."

He said whether the situation worsened would depend a lot on the legislative priorities of the three institutions.

He added that allowing for time to recruit and train staff, it would be at least January before the Parliament was up to its full, budgeted complement of translators.

Sources at the Council said that the current break in the legislative cycle, with the European Parliamentary elections and the appointment of a new Commission, had taken some of the pressure off translation.

"The real test will come after the summer holiday," an EU diplomat said.