European Parliament publishes a corrigendum to the GDPR | Hacker News Reader

European Parliament publishes a corrigendum to the GDPR

technologylawdispatch.com

28 pointsraleighm21 comments

Hold up, there are 26 “official” language versions of the GDPR? How does that work in practice? It would seem that no matter how well researched there is a possible meaning mismatch when you cross languages.

I imagine it's the same issue with any other EU legislation. In the end, it's the job of legislators to be as unambiguous as possible. Maybe that implies being very redundant in wording.

I do wonder what they do in court, though. If a suit concerns parties of different languages and it's found that the issue comes down to a meaning mismatch between languages, does it simply come down to a judge's arbitrary decision? Are there even courts for EU law?

There’s a court for exactly this purpose, which has one judge from each member state:

https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodie...

> EU law currently applies to 27 countries and is available in 23 languages which all carry equal status. In practice, this is achieved though translation and by the work of the DGT (Directorate General Translation), which hosts the largest translation service in the world. But from a legal point of view, translation is institutionally ‗non-existent‘ and EU languages are all equal and authentic. The issue has been given attention in the last two decades mostly from scholars, linguists and translators (Correia 2003, Kjær 1999, Koskinen 2000, Ńarčević 2001, Tosi 2001, Wagner 2000), thus raising awareness on the paradox of translation and the lack of a proper EU language policy and legal culture

Source(pdf): https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/cl/article/download/698...

The specific part about interpreting laws says

> The Court of Justice arbitrates on Community law and pursues a particular, but no less rigorous application of multilingualism. ... each authentic text is considered independent for the purpose of interpretation by the courts and despite being translations, judgements and other documents are deemed to be authentic only if they are the language of the case. On the other hand, as none of them prevails and they all have the same meaning, whenever linguistic divergence or ambiguity arises, the European Court of Justice consults all the texts of a given instrument on a routine basis. Interpreting the intended meaning of the single instrument is given priority over any linguistic discrepancies and this is why revisers and translators of the European Court of Justice need to be lawyers.

The EU has 24 official/working languages (https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...)

I see those 24 languages for the GDPR (https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...). The other two apparently are Norwegian and Icelandic (part of the European Economic Area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area), but not in the EU)

That doesn’t mean _everything_ gets translated into 24 languages, though. Oftentimes, it’s limited to English, French, and German (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...)

I guess the GDPR gets the full treatment because there is no underlying national legislation and/or because each country has its own supervisory authority.

Generally the authority in the country in which you are established is responsible for you and communication will happen with them, same applies when you designate a representative in the union.

Sandardized translations with some minor meaning mismatches are preferable to individual courts translating the law ad hoc for each individual case.

I suspect they have lots of experience at making sure translations are accurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com