Directorates for Legal Translation
The Court’s legal translation service is responsible for all the translation needs of the Court of Justice and the General Court. It is divided into two directorates – Directorate for Legal Translation A and Directorate for Legal Translation B. The language units are divided between the two directorates.
The directors oversee all 24 language units, covering all official EU languages:
- Bulgarian
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- Irish
- German
- Greek
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Maltese
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swedish
The Court’s multilingualism policy stems from its obligations under the rules of procedure of the two courts.
Any of the official languages of the EU can be used as a language of the case and the Translation units ensure that the documents of each case are translated into French, the language of deliberation of the Court, and into any other language needed for the case. They also translate the Court’s judgments and Opinions of the Advocates General into all languages for publication. In order to be able to translate each language into every other language, there are 552 combinations of official EU languages.
For more information about the documents translated, see our pages on:
The texts to be translated are highly technical legal documents, so the service only employs people holding a law degree who also have thorough knowledge of at least two other official EU languages besides their mother tongue. They are known as “lawyer-linguists”. If you are interested in becoming a lawyer-linguist, or working for the Court as a freelance translator, please see:
For more information on the work of the Directorates for Legal Translation, see our dedicated website on Multilingualism.
