Enlargement at the European Court of Justice: Law, Language and Translation

• Published date: 01 November 2008
• Author: Karen McAuliffe
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2008.00442.x
• Date: 01 November 2008

Enlargement at the European Court of

Justice: Law, Language and Translation

Karen McAuliffe*

Abstract: The enlargement of the EU to 25 Member States in May 2005, followed by the

accession of two more states in January 2007, raised a number of questions concerning the

organisational structure of that Union—the sheer scale of the largest EU expansion to

date highlighted the need to restructure EU institutions. For the European Court of

Justice (ECJ), enlargement meant a huge influx of people to staff new divisions in the

administrative hierarchy of the Court. This article describes the process and effects of

enlargement at the ECJ, particularly in relation to translation and the language regime of

that Court. Prior to the May 2004 and January 2007 enlargements there was a general

perception among those working at the Court that enlargement would result in significant

dislocation of life at that institution. In particular, it was felt that the translation direc-

torate would not be able to cope with the addition of 11 ‘new’ languages to the list of

official EU languages. The reality, however, was far from the disaster that many had

predicted. That said, even a mere year following the May 2004 enlargement, a number of

changes in the functioning and dynamics of that Court were already noticeable.

Introduction: The Role of Language at the European Court of Justice

This article focuses specifically on the role of language at the European Court of Justice

(ECJ). While the primary focus of most of the literature on the ECJ is on its jurispru-

dence, the fact that that jurisprudence is multilingual, consisting mainly of collegiate

judgments drafted by jurists in a language that is generally not their mother tongue

is frequently overlooked.1The process behind the production of that multilingual

* University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus. This article is based on the results of periods of participant

observation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities undertaken between 2002 and 2006 as

part of fieldwork research for my PhD Thesis (2006); all comments/criticisms are welcome. Contact:

k.mcauliffe@exeter.ac.uk. Unless otherwise indicated all quotes are taken from interviews with lawyer-

linguists at that Court.

I would like to thank Dr Robert Harmsen of the Queen’s University of Belfast for his support and valuable

comments, as well as Professor Francis Snyder, Professor Imelda Maher and the organisers of the 2007

WISH conference in University College Dublin. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at the

European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for their assistance with this research. In particular, Mr Alfredo

Calot-Escobar and Ms Susan Wright.

Any errors are mine alone.

1That is not to say that no scholarship on language and EU law has focused on the ECJ. In fact, many such

pieces of work are written by Members of that Court (see, for example, D. A. O. Edward, ‘How the Court

of Justice Works’, (1995) 6 European Law Review 539, at 539–558). However, such scholarship tends

European Law Journal, Vol. 14, No. 6, November 2008, pp. 806–818.

© 2008 The Author

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

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