Brussels (EFE).- The Spanish request to make Catalan, Galician and Basque official languages in the European Union has put on the table the question of how much it would cost to implement this measure, on which different community and parliamentary sources agree. It is very difficult to estimate expenses.
The figures and estimates fluctuate between the different institutions and sources consulted, from the already known costs that the interpretation and translation of the 24 official languages now entail to the new budgetary burdens that could be entailed by adding three new official languages to the European corpus.
No study on this for now
A high-ranking source from the European Commission has confirmed to EFE that the institution “has not done any budgetary impact study” of the Spanish request to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official, which is why it warns that “the figures circulating are not reliable.” ”.
Adding these three languages to the list of official ones in the European Union would mean, in addition to incorporating their simultaneous interpretation booths in many meetings, translating into them the entire existing community acquis in the form of regulations, directives, agreements and standards, a mammoth task. that could not be concluded overnight.
The main community documents already available in these three languages are, in fact, the treaties on the functioning of the European Union, which Spain has been able to translate at its own expense by virtue of an article of the Treaty of Lisbon that allows each Member State to provide a copy certified of these texts in languages that are not official in the EU but are in at least part of its territory, just as the Netherlands did with Frisian.
European budget for translation and interpretation
Broadly speaking, a spokesperson for the European Commission estimates that the amount in the European budget allocated to translation and interpretation is equivalent to approximately 6% of total accounts.
The costs of the General Directorate of Interpretation (SCIC), with 483 official interpreters and 970 freelancers, reached around €122 million in 2022 for interpretation at the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of the EU, the Committee of the Regions, the Economic and Social Committee, the European Investment Bank and other community agencies.
For its part, the translation services of the general directorate with the same name – with about 2,000 staff members, of which 70% are translators – cost about 255 million euros in 2022, a figure that includes salaries, training, IT infrastructure , events or the absolute availability of these professionals.
“We only have a general figure and not the cost per language. The costs depend on many individual factors and involve personnel, but also tender procedures, linguistic resources such as term databases, data to feed computer-assisted translation tools and machine translation,” the spokesperson explained.
Difficult to calculate the cost
A parliamentary source agrees on the difficulty of calculating a precise cost for each language, since translators are not only in charge of translating and their “price” depends on many factors. “Each European institution has its translation direction and the cost of introducing Catalan, Basque and Galician will not be the same for each of them,” he adds.
On a day-to-day basis, this source foresees greater spending in the European Parliament due to all the legislative activity and multilingual conferences that are held, while in the Council it may be used more sporadically by ministers or regional councillors. On the other hand, it would be more expensive to translate all community legislation into three languages.
On the other hand, bilateral agreements with Spain have been operating in the Council and the Committee of the Regions for almost two decades; In the case of the Committee of the Regions, this text details that if a participant in one of its meetings wishes to speak in the co-official languages, they must notify the institution “at least seven weeks before the plenary session in question.”
In that case, and except in the exception of denial due to lack of “personal or material means”, the language in question would be interpreted into the rest of the official languages of the EU but not vice versa, which is known as passive interpretation. .
Every six months, the Committee of the Regions sends Spain the invoice with the “direct and indirect” costs of this interpretation, which the Government must pay within a month.
