The Directorate General for Interpretation (DG Interpretation – also known as SCIC) is the European Commission’s interpreting service and conference organiser. It reports to Commissioner Günther H. Oettinger.
As part of the Commission's commitment to transparency, Directors-General publish information on meetings held with organisations or self-employed individuals.
The European Union, in its essence, can be seen as one long, on-going, intense political and technical conference. For 50 years, the Member States have been negotiating day in and day out on the basis of proposals from the Commission. The Regulations and Directives that make up EU legislation begin around the conference table. DG Interpretation provides interpreters for some 11.000 meetings every year and is the largest interpreting service in the world.
DG Interpretation manages the allocation of Commission meeting rooms and provides support for the smooth running of meetings in many languages that are held there. It also organises conferences for Directorates-General and departments of the Commission, typically in the range of over 40 main events per year. Its mission is therefore to make possible multilingual communication at the core of Community decision-making by:
DG Interpretation provides quality interpretation in meetings arranged by the Commission and the other Institutions it serves, and provides a conference organising capacity to Commission services. The European Council, The Council of the Union, The Committee of the Regions, The European Economic and Social Committee, The European Investment Bank, and the agencies and offices in the Member States all get their interpreters from DG Interpretation. At present, the Council accounts for around 46% of the interpreting services provided, followed by the Commission with around 40%. The remaining 14% are spread over the two Committees, the European Investment Bank and various agencies and other bodies.The European Parliament and the European Court of Justice have separate interpreting services with which DG Interpretation collaborates closely.
DG Interpretation provides interpreters for about 50 – 60 meetings per day in Brussels and elsewhere. The language arrangements for these meetings vary considerably – from consecutive interpreting between two languages, for which one interpreter is required, to simultaneous interpreting into and out of 24 or more languages (total symmetry), which requires at least 72 interpreters.
Different institutions have widely different needs. As a rule of thumb, elected representatives (i.e., ministers in formal meetings, plenary meetings of the Committee of the Regions or of the Economic and Social Committee) get full, symmetric language coverage, while officials and experts get a whole range of different arrangements, depending on their real needs and the resources available.
Catering for such language arrangements requires the use of all the various simultaneous interpreting techniques they regularly apply: direct interpreting, relay (interpreting via a bridging language: language A is first put into language B, then into C by interpreters working from B), two-way interpreting or retour (the same interpreter who works from A into B also works from B into A), and asymmetric language coverage (participants can speak a large number of languages but interpretation is provided only into a few).
