‘The Court shall set up a translating service staffed by experts with adequate legal training and a thorough knowledge of several official languages of the Court.' (Article 22 of the Rules of Procedure)

With a staff of 876 in 2008, that is to say, 46% of the Court's total staff, the Translation Directorate General is the institution's largest service.

Translation in the Court is carried out under mandatory rules governing languages and covers all the combinations of the official languages of the European Union. The volume of translation work currently exceeds 700 000 pages per year.

The texts to be translated are all legal texts highly technical in nature. To carry out this task, the service employs only lawyer-linguists who are fully legally qualified and have a thorough knowledge of at least two languages other than their mother tongue.