Does a new language catch up? Translation traction in Spanish and Croatian with Evidence from three EU corpora

by Yinglun Sun

Yinglun Sun is a doctoral student in Linguistics at the University of Illinois. She uses quantitative and corpus methods to uncover patterns in human language production, and is particularly interested in the interactional nature of language use. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023.

One of the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) is the observance and respect of linguistic diversity. This is reflected by regulations that define 24 official languages for the EU, and provisions for the right of EU citizens to write to any of the institutions or bodies of the EU in one of these official languages, and to receive an answer in the same language. In addition, the major institutions of the European Union – such as the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the EU, the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank – all operate at some level of multilingualism in their written communications. Most importantly, legislature documents and public communication material are routinely translated into all of the official EU languages, to ensure understanding by the people, and to promote transparent decision-making. To be able to meet the translation demands with efficiency, the EU institutions employ a sizable translation staff, and over the years have developed their internal translation infrastructure, such as machine translation memories and terminology databases.

Despite the regulatory equal status of all of EU’s official languages, they do not necessarily enjoy the same level of translation capacity and productivity in the EU (Fernández-Parra, 2021) – some official languages may have more translation traction than some other official languages. One of the reasons is that the EU has not always had 24 official languages in its history – new official languages are adopted through enlargements, or when a new member state becomes an official member of the EU. It is on these occasions that translators for the new official languages will be trained and hired, and documents will start to appear in the new official languages. Typically, this preparatory phase lasts for a few years leading up to the accession of the new member state. Most of the translation work during this phase will be translation of the acquis, or existing common rights and obligations that constitute the body of EU law. Then, after the accession of the new member state, translators will start translating into and from the new official language on a daily basis, in accordance with existing practices for official EU languages. Thus, the longer a state has been a member of the EU, the more likely that there will be a stable, experienced team of translators capable of working in the language(s) of that state. Another reason is that a large part of day-to-day translation activities in the EU involve terminology consultation, or situational queries to existing translated documents and terms. This is to ensure that the translations of commonly used terms and names of people, places and entities remain consistent and accurate. Thus, the larger a body of existing translations a language has, the more likely that translators will be able to rely on existing translations rather than inventing and deciding on new translations for terms.

Such an asymmetry in translation traction is demonstrated between Spanish and Croatian, in EUR-Lex and IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe), two of the most frequently used consultation resources for EU translators. Both Spanish and Croatian are non-procedural languages in the EU, but Spanish has been an official language of the EU since 1986, and Croatian only since 2013. Figure. 1 plots the total quantity of translated legislature documents in EUR-Lex in each year, from 1952 to 2022, published in Spanish (orange) and in Croatian (blue).

Figure 1 Total number of EUR-Lex documents by year, in Spanish and Croatian

Figure 1 clearly shows that while the quantity of legislature translation into Croatian is lacking prior to Croatia becoming an official member the EU, it catches up immediately to that of Spanish since Croatia’s accession in 2013. This seems to suggest that at the very least, translation of law documents into a newer official language is as productive as translation into an older one. However, when we examine the wider range of domains covered by the translations in the IATE, it becomes apparent that not all areas of translation are equally productive: for example, not only the total number of Spanish terms in IATE is much larger than that of Croatian (about 7.5 times), the majority of terms in Spanish pertain to scientific and technical domains that are vital to modern industrialized nations, such as law, chemistry, finance, medicine, IT and air transport. Meanwhile, the terms in Croatia seem to focus on international political issues such as migration and rights, as well as non-industrial sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and wildlife. Even within the domain of law translation, there is still asymmetry in productivity among different types of law documents. For example, in EUR-Lex, two types of law documents are particularly scarce in Croatian: EU parliamentary questions, and national transpositions. Parliamentary questions are questions addressed by members of the European Parliament to other EU institutions and bodies, while national transpositions are documents that incorporate EU directives into the national laws of EU member states. This seems to suggest that compared to Spanish, the Croatian language is particularly underrepresented in active, democratic interactions between the EU member state and the major EU institutions.

Overall, the results suggest that while the quantity of translation in legislature for Croatian was able to catch up to that of Spanish upon Croatia’s accession, the quantity of documents and terminology in specific areas are still not as productive for Croatian compared to Spanish. The asymmetry in translation traction is substantial in the range and type of activities that the member state appears to engage in. In other words, the translation of a new official language of the EU may catch up in quantity, but not necessarily in its functional domains.

References

Fernández-Parra, M. (2021). Every Second Counts: A Study of Translation Practices in the European Commission's DGT. Institutional Translation and Interpreting, 111-127.

Posted in: Croatian,EU,Spanish,Translation,Yinglun Sun