Last week, Common Sense Advisory interviewed Juhani (Karl-Johan) Lönnroth, Director General of the European Commission’s translation service, which boasts an impressive 2,500 employees and translates two million pages of content per year across 506 language pairs. Some critics accuse the Directorate General for Translation — the largest service in the entire E.U. — of inefficiencies and bureaucracy, stating that this number of employees is far too great. But is it really? Not according to our calculations.

Consider these facts:

• The Canadian Translation Bureau has 1,200 employees that support a population of 33 million. This means that there is one government translation staff member for every 27,500 people in Canada.
• The Directorate General for Translation has 2,500 employees that serve a population of approximately 500 million. In other words, there is one translation person employed for every 200,000 people in the E.U.
• If we add the Directorate General for Interpretation and its 500 employees into the mix, the ratio changes slightly. The E.U.’s translation and interpretation services have a combined 3,000 employees, which would mean that there is one translation or interpreting staff member for every 167,000 E.U. residents. This is probably a better comparison, since the Canadian Translation Bureau also provides interpreting services.
• How does the E.U. translation service compare to its for-profit peers? The average revenue for the top 30 translation companies in 2008 was US$126 million, and these companies employed 984 people on average. This gives us an average of roughly eight employees for every US$1 million in revenue. In 2006, the E.U. spent approximately 236 million euros on translation and interpreting services — that equates to US$342 million, using an exchange rate of 1.45 dollars for every euro. Using this comparison, the E.U. could have up to 2,736 employees and still keep pace with the efficiency of the world’s top 30 for-profit language service providers. In its current form, the E.U. service is actually more efficient than most large, for-profit translation companies.

We’re not picking on the Canadian Translation Bureau — quite the opposite. Canada has a long history of leading the field in the areas of terminology management, certification, translation, and community interpreting. So, it is not surprising that the country has a robust translation support mechanism – one of the most comprehensive in the world. However, it is surprising to us that the E.U. has such a comparatively smaller ratio of people on staff, especially when one considers the linguistic diversity within its borders. If our calculations are correct, Canadians have six times more translation and interpreting staff per person than do the citizens of the E.U. And, while the Canadian Translation Bureau does offer some language combinations beyond French<>English, they do not bear the burden of 506 language pairs.

Obviously, there are many reasons for the discrepancy, including the structures of the government bodies themselves and the different types of tasks they oversee. In other words, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does help to give some sort of context, especially for those who struggle to understand how and why any organization could possibly need so many people just to convert information from one language to another.

In summary, is the E.U.’s translation service a lumbering, inefficient, dinosaur of a bureaucracy as some critics have claimed? Not in the slightest. Our new members-only “Translation Work and the E.U.” provides more details from our interview with Director General Lönnroth, to help those translation companies interested in capturing a piece of the 12 to 15 million euros the service spends each year with language service providers around the globe.