European Multilingualism and the Role of Translators and Interpreters

When the European Economic Community was first created, it only had six members and four official languages; after more than sixty years and six enlargements the official languages became twenty-four, as the number of Member States increased to twenty-seven. The European Union considers multilingualism one of its core values as well as an essential feature of a democratic organisation and ensures that all of the European citizens have a right to access the European legislation and communicate with the European institutions in their own language. To accomplish this goal of linguistic diversity the European Union employs a considerable number of interpreters and translators. This paper aims to analyse the role of interpreters and translators, who often remain invisible, in this multilingual and multicultural context and prove their importance despite some of the issues connected to this policy. From a general historical and linguistic overview of the European Union, the paper goes into more detail to describe how both translation and interpreting resources are managed in the European institutions, while the final section provides an analysis of the obstacles to multilingualism.