TALLINN - Though the homepage of the European Union's official Internet portal, europa.eu.int, greets visitors in the 25 languages of present and soon-to-be member states, the process of finding the most qualified Estonian translators to work for the EU bureaucracy in Brussels and Strasbourg is still in progress.
At the moment the written tests of applicants from the accession countries are being marked. Those translators who pass will be invited to the oral test, a representative of the European Personnel Selection Office, the recruiting agency for the EU institutions, explained.
The agency said the selection process will likely be completed in the first half of this year. The maximum number of positions re-served for Estonian translators is 135, but that does not mean all positions will be filled by the time accession rolls around in four weeks. Everything depends upon the demand from the EU institutions who can hire translators working with the Estonian language.
EPSO registered 196 applications for the positions of Estonian language translators, but only 118 of the people who had applied took the written test.
According to the European Commission's delegation in Estonia, one of the reasons behind the relatively low number of applicants who passed is that there are few people in the Baltic state who are fluent in two official EU languages apart from their mother tongue.
EPSO, however, assured that a new competition would be organized should the demand for Estonian-language translators exceed the number of specialists selected in the first competition.
The need to step up publicity about the application process for translators must be addressed in other Baltic states as well, said Konrad Fuhrmann, head of the field office of the directorate-general for translation services of the European Commission in Latvia. Those who pass the tests are not necessarily guarenteed a spot. Their recruitment also depends on their language combination. "A lot of Latvian translators are able to translate only from one official language of the European Union," he said.
Meanwhile, translators within Estonia's borders will have their work cut out for them after EU accession, too. For instance, the private sector will have more work to handle in different languages, said to Tolkekunstnikud OU, a Tallinn-based translation and interpretation services company that has been translating EU legal acts and regulatory documents into Estonian and Estonian laws and international agreements into English.
"In the last 12 months the amount of that work has been constantly increasing," said Krista Jurisoo of Tolkekunstnikud. "The effect of EU accession can be seen in increased demand for translation of the European standard and patent specifications. The amount of translations of various machine manuals from German into Estonian has increased in particular."
Jurisoo added the demand for Czech-Estonian and Polish-Estonian translations could also be credited to the upcoming EU enlargement.
Merit Ilja, head of the Estonian Legal Language Center, an institution under the Ministry of Justice that deals with translations of the EU legal acts and other documents, said the work of her institution would change to some extent after May 1.
The language center has translated and outsourced tens of thousands of pages in the last couple of years and is now working on translation of EU legal acts and the rulings of the European Court approved in 2004.
"From May 1 the main focus will be on the development of the legal terminology, but we will also continue with the translation of Estonian legal acts into English," Ilja said.
She added that the new task for the center would involve the translation of international conventions and agreements that Estonia joins, which must be published in Riigi Teataja, Estonia's official publication (also known as the state gazette).
"So far the ministries have been dealing with the translations of conventions, but in the interest of quality it is reasonable to [in the future] concentrate their translating in one institution," Ilja explained.
The center must also take on another new job from May 1: the editing of bills of Estonian laws, work currently done by editors in the Justice Ministry.
The center may take on the task of translating Estonia's legal acts into Russian, work currently being done by the Riigi Teataja Publishing House.
After EU accession this spring, the Estonian Legal Language Center will reduce its workforce from 55 people to 28 people, as the obligation to translate EU legal acts will be formally passed to EU institutions.
"We have acknowledged that it is important to support Estonian translators in EU institutions. That is why we carry on with the terminology work so those translators could use our terminology base," Ilja said.
The head of the center added that the institution was cooperating with the Defense Ministry on NATO issues.
"This year we have a project on the creation and development of military terminology, which will continue next year. We will also likely translate NATO-related texts into Estonian," Ilja added.
The creation of other types of new words is sometimes involved, too, said Ilja. The translators she works with have already encountered the need to invent Estonian words for mollusk diseases and banana breeds. In cooperation with the state chancellery, the legal language center also plans to translate into Estonia the EUROVOC, a thesaurus that covers all fields of EU activities.
