HOW MUCH DOES THE EU COMMISSION TRANSLATE?

In 2012 output was 1.76 million pages. Of this 76% was done in-house and the rest was done by contractors (translation companies and freelance translators. A page is 1 500 typed characters not including spaces.

DG Translation's workload is steadily rising, because of the constant expansion in the Commission's areas of activity and since more official EU languages have been added. With Croatia the EU will count 24 languages.

The cost of translation is estimated at € 300 million a year or some € 0.60 for every citizen.

According to certain very rough estimates, the cost of all language services in all EU institutions amounts to less than 1% of the annual budget of the EU. Divided by the population of the EU, this comes to around € 2 per person per year.

Translation work includes: Legislation,policy documents, reports to other EU institutions, background papers on legal, technical, financial, scientific and economic issues, correspondence, webpages, press material, speeches and minutes- whatever the Commission and its departments need for their work.