Introduction
EU and
EU-related texts might not be the bulk of the work at STP, but there are some
things that are useful, and sometimes essential, to know for when they actually
do land on our desks.
This page contains some information on how
to find EU directives and other legislative acts as well as terminology. It
also gives an introduction to the EU’s interinstitutional style guide and
provides some tips and useful links. One section describes our "EU
TMs". Finally, there is also brief guidance on translating directives into
Norwegian, a non-EU language.
How to search for EU legislation (EUR-Lex)
When
translating EU-related documents, it is important to use the correct names and
numbers of the EU legislative acts (e.g. decisions, regulations and directives).
Also, legislation is translated into all official EU languages, including
Danish, Finnish and Swedish, so the translator needs to use the existing
official translation in their language and not make up their own translation
when quoting from or referring to these acts. Always double-check the name and
number of a legislative act before using it in the translation.
The
main resource for finding this information is EUR-Lex. It is a service
that gives free access to EU law and other public documents. Go to http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ and select the required language (you can
change language later at any time).
Then
scroll down to Find results by on
the main page. If you know the document number and year that you are looking
for (e.g. Directive 2002/96/EC),
enter them in the appropriate fields. You do not need both the number and the
year, but if you enter only one search term, the list of results will be very
long.
You can
also select the type of documents you are looking for in the search box (All,
Regulation, EU court case, Directive, COM and JOIN documents, Decision or SEC
or SWD documents). If you know the CELEX number of the document, you can enter
this in the second tab instead.
Click the name of the document in the search
results. On the next page, you can select the languages you wish to see side by
side (up to three) under Multilingual
display:
The
following screenshot shows Directive 2002/96/EC in English, Finnish and
Swedish. (This happens to be the so-called WEEE directive, which is often
referred to in some texts that we translate, such as consumer electronics
manuals.)
The
method described above is the easiest way to search for legislation with
EUR-Lex. However, there is also an advanced search option if you do not know
the year or the number of the document you are looking for. There is a link to
the advanced search on the home page:
On the
next page, you can choose a collection you want to search (e.g. international
agreements or EU case law) if you wish. You can use the text search (you can
use OR and NOT if you want to search for several phrases or if you want to
exclude phrases from the results). There are also other options: you can
specify the author (e.g. the European Council), date (either a specific date or
a range) or the issue of the Official Journal.
TIP! Start with a simpler search and add more search terms
if it looks like you are getting too many results!
TIP! '2002/96' in Directive
2002/96/EC means that this is directive number 96 from the year 2002. Before
1999, only two numbers were used to indicate the year. For example, Directive
98/37/EC is from 1998. See e.g. http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-130200.htm for more detailed information on
the numbering of legislation.
How to search for terminology (IATE and EUR-Lex)
IATE is the EU's inter-institutional
terminology database which contains millions of terms and is continuously being
updated. Until 2004, the different institutions had their own databases (the
Commission had Eurodicautom, for example), but their information has now been
consolidated into IATE.
You can
find IATE here: http://iate.europa.eu/
Under My
search preferences at the top of the page you can load and save the source
and target languages that you use the most, so that you don't need to select
these every time you use IATE.
The following screenshot shows a search for
'principle of subsidiarity' with Swedish as the target language: