MERCATOR :: News

November 2004

SPAIN PROVIDES TRANSLATION OF EU CONSTITUTIONAL TREATY IN THREE “LINGUISTIC VERSIONS” BUT FOUR TEXTS (Avui)

November 2004 – Spain has been the first state to make use of the possibility that the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe be also “translated into any other languages as determined by Member States”, as set forth in Article IV-448. This step is acknowledged in a declaration annexed to the Constitution as a way to contribute to “fulfilling the objective of respecting the Union's rich cultural and linguistic diversity”. However, such translation is just symbolic, as it is not an authentic one and neither does it entail the right to address the European institutions in the languages into which it has been translated. And it is precisely the translation languages, in particular the translation into Catalan and Valencian as two separate languages, what brought about a controversy and a strong political dispute in the Spanish scenario, finally solved by the Secretary-General of the Council of the EU, Javier Solana, at least for the moment.

Solana sent a letter on 18 November to all 25 Member State Foreign Affairs Ministers in which he stated that Spain had provided a translation of the Treaty into “three linguistic versions”, thus certifying that Valencian and Catalan are the same language and clarifying the confusion created by the Spanish Government on 4 November, when it submitted 4 different texts to the Council of the EU as if there were four languages (Galician, Basque, Valencian and Catalan). The texts had been facilitated to the Spanish Government by the four autonomous communities concerned, while Navarre and the Balearic Islands did not submit any translation since they acknowledge their language as Basque (“vascuence” in the case of Navarre) and Catalan, respectively. Solana listed the three “versions”, according to a certificate annexed by the Spanish Government, as one translation into Euskara (i.e. Basque), one into Galician and one “into the language known as “Valencian” in the autonomous community of Valencia and as “Catalan” in the autonomous community of Catalonia”. Moreover, he stressed in the letter that the two different texts submitted by the Spanish Government for Catalan and Valencian were certified “as identical”.

Nonetheless, the claims for wider rights for Spain’s language communities are still far from being fulfilled. The next step to be made is Spain’s petition to give its ‘other’ languages the status of EU official and working languages. In order to reach such status the regulation determining the Union’s linguistic regime (Regulation no. 1/1958) will have to be modified and the Spanish Government is already preparing a memorandum for this purpose, even though it has not yet made public when it will be ready, and it will most likely raise further debate. There is still uncertainty as to which name will be given to the Catalan language, although the Spanish State Secretary for European Affairs, Alberto Navarro, has already sketched out that one possibility is to refer to the language as Catalan in the international sphere while Valencian would only be used in the Valencian Country. Another option is “Catalan/Valencian”. The memorandum might include as well the petition that Catalan, Basque and Galician speakers be granted the right to address the European institutions in their language and that European regulations translated into these languages be legally valid. Moreover, the door for the inclusion of more languages in the list of “languages of the Constitution” may open again in 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria become EU Member States.

For more information, see previous Mercator-Legislation news: April, May, June, July, September and November 2004.