Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

However, plaintiffs—who may be member states or authorities within a national jurisdiction—may bring cases in whichever language they wish, which is normally the language of that state. The language of the state becomes “the language of the case,” and all documents in the file, whatever their source, must be translated into that language. More work for (different members) of the law-and-language team. But that is only half the story. The legal decisions of the court are made by all or some of the twenty-seven European advocates general, one appointed by each of the member states. The ultimate authority consists of a set of distinguished judges collectively speaking and writing all twenty-four languages of the EU. They use French for lunchtime conversation, informal consultations, and committee discussion, but they give their all-important opinions on the cases before them in their home tongues. For example, a case brought by the Portuguese government against a Bavarian dairy-farming consortium that is judged by the Estonian advocate general involves translations in five directions—PORFRE, FREPOR, FRE GER, GERFRE, and ESTFRE, allowing four additional transmissions by relay from French POR[FRE]GER, GER [FRE]POR, EST[FRE]POR, and EST[FRE]GER. The three remaining directions (see here for the math), from French, Portuguese, and German into Estonian, are not needed because, except when giving his opinion, the advocate general operates in the language of the court, which is French. However, since the rulings of the ECJ have force in the entire EU, legal opinions are not released and do not come into effect until they have been translated into all twenty-four of the official tongues. Every section of the 750-strong corps of lawyer-linguists at the ECJ becomes involved at some stage in every decision that is made.

Euroskeptics treat this lavish provision of multidirectional translation at the ECJ as a scandal of waste—a mere job-creation scheme. It’s true things didn’t happen that way in the appeal courts of the multilingual Ottoman and Hapsburg states, and the ECJ does cost a lot to run. It’s also true that the law of unintended consequences means that language parity as implemented in the steel-and-glass palace on the Kirchberg Plateau creates very awkward disparities of its own. If you are a trained lawyer from Malta, Estonia, or Hungary with excellent French and a good knowledge of one other European language, the job opportunities in Luxembourg are very attractive indeed. The effect is that Malta, Estonia, and Hungary have difficulty recruiting such individuals for their own national civil services, where their skills are very much in need. But if you are a British lawyer with excellent French and one other European language under your belt, you have far more lucrative careers waiting for you in London and New York, and the ECJ thus has a chronic shortage of translators into precisely those languages it most frequently needs.

But the EU cannot exist without the ECJ. If the ECJ were to abandon its own version of the language-parity rule, it’s not obvious how European law could have force in any of its twenty-seven member states. That’s why for the last fifty years, all supposedly commonsensical or budgetary objections to its translation regime have been overruled. The political will to make Europe work is too strong and too grand to let translation issues stand in its way. Europe really has built a radically new kind of translation world.

What’s quite specific to the ECJ, however, is that it does not employ translators as such. Language professionals in the Kirchberg complex are all also lawyers, and they are involved in the work of the court at many levels beyond strict language transfer.

Lawyer-linguists have access to confidential material and work under the same procedural rules as lawyers; they also advise on drafting, down to the small details that might produce ambiguities when expressed in other languages. The work of a lawyer-linguist is much more than translation—it is the manipulation of the law as language and language as law.[141]

Many of the cases brought before the ECJ arise from conflicting interpretations in different member states of regulations made by the European authorities—in effect, clashes between different interpretations of different language versions of what is held to be the same text. Given that all language versions have force of law, how does the court deliver the judgment of Solomon that this version is to be preferred over that one?