Language policy 

​Our aim is to provide you with information in your own language - or one you can understand - depending on what kind of information you are looking for.
Contents

Official languages of the EU

​Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. ​

Languages in which different information is published on the website of the Committee of the Regions

  • ​​​Website navigation structure is published in the EU official languages. ​​
  • ​​​​General information is published in the EU official languages as and when it is translated. 
  • ​​Official documents, documents of political importance, plenary session information and documents are published in all EU official languages 
  • ​​Information which is urgent or has a short lifespan (news, events,…) is not published in all languages. The choice of the language(s) depends on the target audience of the information. 
  • Specialised information (technical information, work in progress, calls for tender) is mainly published in English ​
  • National and regional targeted information (Europe in my region) is published in the language of the country. 
  • Contact forms and answers to your messages can be submitted in any EU official language and answers are provided when possible in the same language. An alternative preferred language (English, French or German) is requested to ensure swift reply. 

Surprised some information isn't available in your language? 

​Website visitors are sometimes surprised that a page isn't available in their language. Generally, the languages available on the Committee of the Regions website depend on the following constraints:

  • ​(legal) importance – the public must have access to all official documents, so these are produced in all official languages. Other documents are translated only into the languages needed (for example, communication with national authorities, organisations or individuals); 
  • ​urgency – to be relevant, some types of information need to be published rapidly. Since translation takes time, we prefer to publish quickly in the languages understood by the largest number of Europeans, rather than to wait for translations into all languages; 
  • cost-effectiveness – to save taxpayers' money, for highly-specialised pages consulted only by a relatively small number of people, the concern is to ensure that most can understand the essence of the information; 
  • ​​technical constraints – managing a site in over 20 languages is highly complex, requiring a lot of human and financial resources; ​
  • ​​translation – we only have (access to) limited numbers of translators and a limited budget for translation (all taxpayers' money). 

Howev​er, on a selected number of pages we offer you the possibility of requesting an automatic machine translation provided by the European Commission's eTranslation service:​​​

  • ​A machine translation can give you a basic idea of the content in a language you understand. It should nevertheless be borne in mind that it involves no human intervention and that the quality and accuracy of machine translation can vary significantly from one text to another and between different language pairs. 

We would ​welcome your ​​feedback on machine transla​tion! You can submit it here​.​ ​​


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