Multilingualism in the European Parliament
Multilingualism, the use of several languages, is an important feature of European democracy.
In the European Parliament, all 24 EU official languages are equally important. Members have the right to read and write parliamentary documents in the official language of their choice. They also have the right to speak and listen in that language to parliamentary meetings and debates.
Translation and interpretation allow citizens to engage with the European Parliament in the official language of their choice and to follow parliamentary meetings in different languages either in person or online.
Languages also play an important role when it comes to EU legislation. The European Parliament must ensure that the legislation it adopts is available in all EU official languages. This enables citizens to understand the laws that affect them.
Key legal texts:
From 4 to 24 languages
The official languages of the European Union are laid down in Council Regulation No 1/1958. When a new country joins the EU, this regulation may be updated to include that country’s official language(s). All official languages have equal status.
Since the founding of the European Union in the 1950s, when only four languages were used, the number of official languages has increased to 24.
With 24 official languages, each language can be translated and interpreted into 23 other languages. This means there are 552 possible translation and interpretation combinations.
EU Official languages - timeline
- 1958: Dutch, French, German, Italian
- 1973: Danish, English
- 1981: Greek
- 1986: Portuguese, Spanish
- 1995: Finnish, Swedish
- 2004: Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, Slovene
- 2007: Bulgarian, Irish, Romanian
- 2013: Croatian
Key legal texts:
Translation Service
The European Parliament’s translation service guarantees that content related to Parliament’s legislative, budgetary and scrutiny activities is accessible in all official languages, ensuring transparency and legitimacy. It also provides linguistic services to ensure that Parliament’s communication with citizens is multilingual, clear, inclusive and accessible to everyone.
The Directorate-General for Translation and Clear Language (DG TRAD) employs around 1 100 staff, among them more than 600 translators, making it one of the biggest employers of its kind.
Interpretation Service
The European Parliament’s interpretation service provides live interpretation during parliamentary meetings. This allows Members from all over Europe to engage in debate across different languages. It also means that speeches in public parliamentary meetings can be followed in different official EU languages by citizens via web streaming. Interpreting services are provided for plenary sessions, committee meetings and other multilingual meetings.
The Directorate-General for Logistics and Interpretation for Conferences (DG LINC) has a team of around 250 in-house interpreters. It also maintains a network of over 1 500 accredited freelance interpreters who work regularly for the European Parliament.
Legislative Acts
The legislation adopted by the European Parliament affects over 450 million people in 27 countries and 24 official languages. It must be identical and as clear as possible in all the languages. Parliament’s lawyer-linguists are responsible for this.
The team of approximately 75 lawyer-linguists ensures, at all stages of the legislative process, the highest possible quality of legislative texts in all EU official languages.
Their main tasks include:
- providing drafting and procedural advice to Members and committee secretariats from the initial drafting phase of a legislative text until its final adoption in plenary;
- checking the legal-linguistic and technical quality of all legislative texts put to the vote in committee and plenary;
- publishing all texts adopted in plenary on the day of the vote;
- finalising legislative acts in cooperation with Council’s lawyer-linguists.