The Towers
       
 

The Towers 

   

The Towers

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pixelFrom the start, the architectural project envisaged the accommodation of the translation service in Towers, whose size - 24 storeys each - and visibility reflect the importance of multilingualism in the very functioning of the Community Court.

The Court of Justice has language arrangements which have no equivalent in any other court in the world, since any of the official languages of the European Union may be the language of the case. Multilingualism has to be integral to the Court's operation because of the need to communicate with the parties in the language of the proceedings and to disseminate its case-law in all the Member States in their own languages.

 

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With 24 official languages the Court, in practice, has to manage 552 language pairs.
To meet this challenge, the translation service is organised in sections which employ only lawyers who have both legal training and a command of at least three official languages. This high level of qualification makes it possible, first, to ensure the necessary mediation between the European Union Court and the parties and, second, to guarantee access for the European citizen to the European Union case-law in his own language.

 
       
   

The Towers

 
 

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The translation service of the Court is made up of a Directorate-General divided into language units, which, in turn, are assisted by four units responsible for cross-unit tasks. Its staff makes up more than 40% of the staff of the institution and its annual workload amounts to around 1 000 000 pages of translation, more than 500 000 pages of which are published in the European Court Reports.
Each language unit has its own space in the Towers over two floors linked by a spiral staircase.
Access to the two Towers is via the Gallery. This position on the central artery of the buildings complex is ideal for a service which works for all three European Union Courts. Its position also affords it the advantage of direct access to the resources of the library, which are indispensable for legal translation.