Tõlkimisest Euroopa Liidu institutsioonides
About Translation in the EU Institutions

Summary/Abstract: This article examines mainly four topics: 1) the impact of the European Union’s multilingualism policy on the Estonian language, 2) the role of translation in implementing multilingualism, 3) the translation pipeline in EU institutions, and 4) changes in the translator’s profession. Based on statistics, the author shows that the Estonian language entities in eight EU institutions translate yearly more than 200,000 pages of EU documents into Estonian. At the same time terminologists and translators of the Commission, Council and European Parliament introduce several thousand new terms into the IATE database (Inter-Active Terminology for Europe). The total number of Estonian terms in IATE covering all fields of the activity of the EU is 60,249 (by 30.09.2018). The author argues that the multilingualism policy and the status of being one of the 24 official languages creates favourable conditions for the development of the Estonian language. At the same time, the author highlights some problematic areas and risks which may affect the Estonian culture due to the so-called Euro-language, a by-product of EU legislation drafting and translations. The author also looks into the role of translation in the EU legislative procedure, issues related to machine translation and changes in the translator’s profession, based on the new European Master in Translation (EMT) Competence Framework. The author makes some proposals to enhance cooperation between the translation departments of EU institutions and Estonian authorities, as well as suggests some joint research topics (e.g. translation industry, Euro-language/Eurolect, etc.). The main idea underlying the article is that the current industry based translation process and methodology used in the EU institutions differs from the traditional romantic concept of authorship used for centuries in translation theory and practice.

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