The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) is one of the largest translation services in the world. Located in Brussels and Luxembourg, it has a permanent staff of some 1,650 linguists and 550 support staff, and also uses freelance translators all over the world. The service translates written text into and out of all the E.U.’s official languages, exclusively for the European Commission.

The addition of 10 new countries to the European Union in May 2004 put a lot of strain on meeting the language requirements. With the addition of Gaelic in 2005, the E.U. found itself dealing with 21 official languages: German, English, Danish, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, and Czech. The E.U. has taken a few actions to limit its content exposure.

First, the Council took the difficult step of limiting translations for some languages. Henceforth, only regulations adopted by the European Parliament and the Council under the co-decision procedure will have to be available in Gaelic (with roughly 280,000 speakers in Ireland and another 58,000 in Scotland). Other legislative acts will be exempted for a transition period of five years to allow time to train and recruit translators. It adopted a similar procedure for Maltese (330,000 speakers worldwide). Maybe it’s time to bring in a bit of machine translation to offset the zero translation for the island people of Ireland and Malta.

Secondly, the E.U. throttled back the information that it generates. It decreed that documents can only be 15 pages in length, down from an average of 37 pages before May 2004. That 60% cut in document length will obviously have a huge impact on downstream translation, but will require training for the many eurocrats suffering from chronic logorrhea.

Thirdly, the E.U. pumped up staff. By using all available recruitment options ranging from open competitions for permanent staff to selection procedures for temporary staff, DGT recruited 429 translators by the end of June 2005. The current number is 22 translators short of the target set for January 2005.

Finally, the E.U. continued outsourcing translation work. The commission spent €320 million on translations last year, while the E.U. institutions altogether spent some €800 million. This money goes to the internal staff, freelance translators, consortia of European companies like Eulogia, and individual firms like Euroscript from Luxembourg.

All told, the E.U. has taken strong actions to both limit the length of source documents and then what gets translated. Combined with other proactive measures such as training authors, improving source language quality, and better managing the content it generates, the E.U. can begin to tame the numbing deluge of words that threatens to drown government and business.