The combined analyses of institutional text corpora, legal frameworks, language policy documents and translation managers’ (and quality advisers’) perceptions have provided ample evidence of how legal factors, together with financial and political considerations, impact the breadth and depth of translation-mediated multilingualism as implemented in three representative international settings. The legal hierarchy of each institutional order, and the concomitant priorities of semantic accuracy and intertextual and inter-linguistic consistency, are mirrored in the conceptualization, strategies and quality assurance of translation. The quantitative and qualitative prominence of legal functions, despite their variations per institution, is common to all the translation settings exam-ined. It affirms the relevance of applying the paradigm of legal translation, with its vari-ability of legal parameters and communicative scenarios, to this sui generis field of practice governed by organization-specific conventions.
Regarding the scope of multilingualism, the most significant difference between language regimes is also grounded in legal considerations. The EU’s principle of equal authenticity of its Member States’ national languages is primarily a requirement of
19 https://what-europe-does-for-me.eu/.
legitimacy and direct enforceability of EU law and not just a symbolic corollary of diversity. In practice, however, full EU multilingualism is only systematic in the case of legal acts and “core business”, and coexists with various forms of reduced multilingual-ism for the sake of cost-effectiveness. These involve the use of working, procedural or pivot languages, particularly for “internal business,” and entail a distinction between primary and secondary functions (including input, instrumental or derived functions) also elicited through textual mapping and categorization in the LETRINT project.
Establishing priorities for complete multilingualism thus also implies identifying hierarchies of textual categories in accordance with the legal hierarchies that frame institutional functions.
The limitations of multilingualism, which are inherent to any resource-constrained selection of official or working languages, present more internal layers and variants in the case of highly inclusive regimes such as the EU’s. In fact, the broader the language coverage, the more compelling the need to introduce “correctives” for pragmatic reasons and the starker the contrasts become between full and restricted multilingual-ism within the same setting. The WTO, with only three official languages, facilitates mother-tongue accessibility to a lower proportion of Member States, but its trilingual translation policy is systematically applied to all non-confidential documents. This organization engages in no significant restriction of language policy implementation for specific purposes, as opposed to the UN or the EU systems of working or procedural languages. It is in the latter context that LETRINT’s textual mapping has revealed the largest volume of documents not translated in all EU official languages and the most marked (and rapidly growing) surplus of texts available in English (with the exception of the CJEU).
These findings also point to a parallel trend: the predominant use of English for nego-tiating and drafting originals. Although this is not indicated in EU legal instruments, the language of the “vanishing original” (Dollerup, 2004) is most often English, as in the other two settings. In the words of Van Parijs (2011, p. 123), the “growing tension [. . .]
between efficient communication in today’s EU and the wish to assert parity of esteem among its official languages” is proportional to “the number of recognized languages”
and “the asymmetric learning of just one of these languages.”
The widespread use of ELF at international organizations reflects and encourages a global hierarchy of languages that hinders linguistic parity and perpetuates imbal-ances in the implementation of multilingualism. The language of originals shapes the content to be conveyed in the other languages and dictates translation directionality.
Furthermore, as a result, it usually prevails in the interpretation of multilingual law at the expense of interlinguistic comparison. This apparent sign of pragmatism not only may hamper legal certainty but can also be regarded as the ultimate test of the value assigned to multilingualism by those who strive for the uniform interpretation of its legal core. In the case of the EU, this is aggravated by the impracticality of comparing 24 languages.
The appropriation of a language for global communication by native and non-native speakers also has a bearing on the quality of the originals and the features of “institutional
Englishes” as opposed to more idiomatic “local Englishes.” In our examination of the scope and properties of translation-mediated multilingualism, the key aspect of output quality cannot be decoupled from this issue of originals as institutional translation is a quality filter itself from which original texts are often deprived. The strategies applied in their translation echo the legal priorities of accuracy and consistency, and legal rele-vance criteria are accordingly embedded in text profiling and risk assessment in quality assurance practices. The need for harmonization and streamlining, heightened by the growing number of official languages, has led the EU institutions to adopt the most explicit and structured approaches to translation quality policy. As encapsulated in the DGT Translation Quality Guidelines, recommendations are also made to enhance read-ability and cultural adaptation of informative texts for the public, challenging surface-level similarity and promoting awareness of communicative fitness as a condition for quality. Recent political developments in Europe have added momentum to this approach and illustrate why effective multilingual outreach matters.
The multilingual fabric of international governance results from the intersection of the legal, textual and linguistic hierarchies examined here. Its warp is framed by legal func-tions and is most often strung in English, while the weft adds more or less varied colors and pattern depending on the intended use and the skills, time and tools employed.
Whereas the appearance of the product will be visible on the surface, other qualities of the underlying threads need to be examined more closely. Likewise, the assessment of institutional approaches to multilingualism must pay heed not only to language coverage but also to translation properties and linguistic asymmetries in the production process.
The balancing act between translation quantity and quality emerges as a complex systemic choice in light of the legal, political and financial considerations highlighted here.
Without the weaver’s skillful attention, however, the fabric of multilingualism could well prove unsuitable or even unravel.
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