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 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.
Source(pdf): https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/cl/article/download/698...
> 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.
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?
https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodie...