Introducing the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission
The Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) is the European Commission's in-house translation service and one of the biggest public translation services in the world. The DGT offers high quality translations into and from the 23 official languages of the EU. Its aim is to bring European institutions closer to European citizens and to ensure that the latter have access to information on European policies.
Given its key institutional and political position, the DGT has great responsibility toward the translation community. It is not merely an operational service providing high quality translations. It contributes to the definition of multilingualism policy and develops actions and activities in this field to raise awareness about policy issues and to enhance the profession of the translator. It cooperates with both EU bodies and external stakeholders in order to raise the status and visibility of the profession, to disseminate best practices, to steer training in directions that reflect the needs of the market, and to improve the employability of future translators.
Within the European institutions the DGT promotes and disseminates best practices, raises awareness about the linguistic implications of all European policies, and works to integrate the linguistic dimension in all EU policies. Beyond the EU and Europe, the DGT can act as a powerful catalyst and as a point of reference for the whole translation community. It can apply vital skills and competencies to address and channel political and technological issues, promote and disseminate best practices, and bring together stakeholders and professionals. Last but not least, the DGT plays an important role in designing the training of future translators.
One of the most recent projects in this context is the Web Platform for the Language Industry. The idea of developing and launching the web platform grew out of a study on the size of the EU language industry, published by the European Commission in November 2009. Besides its main finding − that the language industry has shown resilience in face of the economic crisis and that it is set to continue growing steadily − the study also revealed that the language industry, in spite of its vitality and weight, is still largely unrecognized. It suffers from lack of visibility, and statistical data and information are not easy to find.
Hence it became apparent that there was a need for a tool which could gather information relevant to the translation industry and which could make that information available on a European level. Such a tool would promote synergies and exchanges among language professionals, and raise awareness about the output and potential of this sector. In the long run, this instrument should make enough data available to modify the international statistical classification system (NACE) so that the language industry is fully recognized as an industrial sector per se. With the NACE classification system taking our industry into account, industry policy measures can be better implemented.
It is with a view to filling this void that the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation decided to develop the platform, which was officially launched on 18 November 2010. It is an interactive online tool for collecting and exchanging data on the European Union language profession and industry. It is managed by the DGT, but input is welcomed from companies, associations and individuals active in the language industry as well as national statistic and academic bodies. It covers all subsectors of the language industry and offers document search and upload, as well as a news section in which news and documents can be highlighted.
Its objectives are manifold and ambitious:
- to bring language professionals together,
- to improve the exchange of know-how,
- to raise awareness of the business,
- to collect more comparable data from EU countries,
- to inform language professionals about research on and by the language industry, and
- to carry out surveys on market trends and on the state of the sector (the first survey was published on the site a few months ago).
The platform is actively promoted in order to make it known among stakeholders and other interested parties and to attract their contribution. A new editorial board has just been set up, which is composed of representatives from various sectors of the language industry and has the primary task of monitoring and evaluating the contributions sent for inclusion in the repository. It can also propose any necessary addition to its functionalities. The platform has been presented Europe-wide in the course of several international events, notably the Translation Studies Days in Brussels, the Gala conference in Lisbon, the EUATC conference in Rome, the META-FORUM conference in Budapest. It will also be presented at the upcoming tcworld conference.