Translation - Policies

The basic principles underlying the language policy of the European Union are that everybody in the Union should be able to contribute to the building of it, should be informed about what it is doing in their name and should be provided with texts of EU law in a language he or she can understand.

The very first Council Regulation of 1958 (which has been amended after successive enlargements) lists the official languages of the Union and states when they must be used. The EU has to have translation services to put these rules into effect:

Council Regulation No. 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community, as amended after each enlargement:

Article 1

The official languages and the working languages of the institutions of the Union shall be Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

Article 2

Documents which a Member State or a person subject to the jurisdiction of a Member State sends to institutions of the Community may be drafted in any one of the official languages selected by the sender. The reply shall be drafted in the same language.

Article 3

Documents which an institution of the Community sends to a Member State or to a person subject to the jurisdiction of a Member State shall be drafted in the language of such State.

Article 4

Regulations and other documents of general application shall be drafted in the official languages.

Article 5

The Official Journal of the European Union shall be published in the official languages.

The Regulation is based on the EC Treaty, Article 290. Article 314 lays down the principle of multilingualism. Article 21 states that every citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions or bodies in one of the languages mentioned in Article 314 and have an answer in the same language.

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