How does translation and interpretation work in the EU?
• On a day-to-day basis, the European Commission uses three working languages — English, French and German. Draft policy papers and draft legislation are produced in one or more of these languages. Only at the final stages are the texts translated into all 20 official languages. • The European Parliament, which often needs to produce documents rapidly in all official languages, has developed a system of six ‘pivot’ languages. The six are English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish. A document presented in, say, Slovak or Swedish will not be translated directly into all other 19 languages. Instead it will be translated into the pivot languages and then retranslated from one of them into the others. This removes the need for translators able to work directly from Maltese to Danish or from Estonian to Portuguese, and hundreds of other combinations as well. If texts were translated directly from all official EU languages into all the others, this would give a total of 380 bilatera
