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Brussels would need to translate hundreds of thousands of pages of EU law into Basque, Galician and Catalan under a Spanish proposal that will add to the strains on Europe’s stretched translation service.
Spain has asked the EU to add the three tongues to its list of 24 official languages as part of Pedro Sánchez’s efforts to woo smaller regional parties, whose support he needs to secure a fresh mandate as prime minister.
If member states unanimously agree, the plan would require the translation of the full acquis of EU laws into each new language, as well as international treaties and thousands of proposals and decisions from the European Commission over the past six decades.
Irish became an official and working language of the EU in 2007 but its use was phased in and not all documents were translated until 2022, in part due to an inability to attract enough personnel to translation posts.
“The problem is the technical feasibility,” said François Grin, a professor of translation and interpreting at the University of Geneva. “It depends on the availability of competent translators who can do the task in a reasonable timeframe.”
Pressures on the translation services are already causing issues for the EU’s legislative system. The bloc’s laws need to be translated into all 24 languages before they can enter into force. Up to 180 pieces of legislation await parliamentary approval before the next EU elections in June, all of which must be translated before MEPs can give their green light.
According to a directorate general for translation report for 2022, employees have been “translating voluminous packages with extremely tight deadlines and very limited predictability” due to the flood of proposals relating to the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis.
When parliament returns in September, there will be fewer new proposals, but still a considerable backlog of texts “in the later stages of translation” awaiting “lawyer linguists to finalise the laws”, a parliament official said.
Every 100 pages of legislation takes 30 days to translate, according to parliamentary officials. In 2022, the commission produced almost 2.6mn pages of translation, just behind the record year of 2.77mn in 2021.
Spain, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, faces the challenge of convincing the other member states that these changes are worthwhile. An EU official said the council would “examine” the Spanish language request, adding it was too soon to say if it would be on the ministers’ agenda in September.
The proposal is a sweetener for Sánchez’s most difficult potential ally, the Together for Catalonia party, which has much bigger demands linked to its aspirations for Catalan independence.
Catalan, Basque and Galician are already official languages in Spain.
According to the Spanish census for 2021, 2.1mn Catalans, 1mn Galicians and 350,000 residents of the Basque country speak the respective languages as their mother tongues. Spanish, however, is more widely spoken as a maternal language in each autonomous region than the other respective official languages.
Sánchez, now acting prime minister, has governed since 2018 thanks to an assortment of leftwing and separatist parties who have voted with his Socialists. But an inconclusive general election in July left him needing the support of Catalan and Basque parties to reach a majority and stay in office.
Aleix Clarió, an aide to Together’s founder, the former Catalan president and MEP Carles Puigdemont, noted that the Socialists had made a similar promise in 2022 and not followed through.
“They have broken every promise and now they promise again.”
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