The President of the European Parliament, Josep BORRELL, decided on 13 October 2004, with the support of the Bureau, to ban interpreting from or into any unofficial language in the Parliament.
This decision contrasts with a report carried out by the Parliament’s legal service, according to which there are several ways in which unofficial languages could be used and translated, in order to be “more flexible”. However, Mr. BORRELL rejected the report’s proposals: despite he decided not to prevent MEPs from using unofficial languages in plenary meetings, in an attempt to avoid any more linguistic incidents, no interpreting will be provided. If MEPs use any unofficial language, the President of the Chamber will interrupt them in order to inform them that their speech will not be translated into the 20 official languages and that neither will it be recorded in the minutes of the sitting. If, nonetheless, a particular MEP wishes to proceed in the same language he/she will not be stopped.
Interestingly enough, just the day after making this decision the Bureau had to make an exception, as it allowed Kurdish Layla ZANA to speak in Catalan and her words were placed on record, since on the basis of the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, “speeches delivered in one of the official languages shall be simultaneously interpreted into the other official languages and into any other language the Bureau may consider necessary” (Rule 138.2). Other relevant rules concerning the chamber’s linguistic regime are Rules 138.4, 201 and 202.
By contrast, as pointed out by the report of the Parliament’s legal service, one option would have been that MEPs wishing to speak in an unofficial language should ask the Parliament’s Bureau for permission in advance and submit to the interpreting service a translation of their speech into any of the official languages. In fact, this has already been done in several occasions. In line with this option, the President of the Catalan Parliament, who met with Josep BORRELL on 21 October 2004, offered the possibility that the Parliament of Catalonia provides for the translation of Catalan MEPs speeches into an EU official language. Another option would have been to take advantage of the existing interpreters who have perfect knowledge of unofficial languages, therefore guaranteeing interpreting into at least one official language, which would then allow relay interpreting. In the case of Catalan, this would be highly feasible, as most staff interpreters working at the Spanish language division of the Interpreting Directorate are Catalan-speakers.
As regards the linguistic regime of EU institutions, the Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication Strategy, Margot WALLSTRÖM, said in the Parliament on 30 September 2004 that more languages should be added to the list of EU official and working languages, although she added that the EU is to the limit of its capacities from a practical point of view. She also stated that “Member States should find the best solutions to deal with the issue of smaller linguistic groups”. Some days later she explained such words in a letter to several citizens who had protested (published in the newspaper www.diariparlem.com), by saying that her statement “had no reference at all with the absolute size of the group, but only with the status of a language which is not the majority language within a Member State and has not the status of an official language of the European Union. What I meant is that the rules to deal with linguistic issues are decided unanimously by Member States and the Commission must operate on the basis of those rules.” |
