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552 Language Combinations, and 72 Interpreters in One Room

The European Union has 24 official languages. Each can be translated into the other 23, which gives 552 possible language combinations.

For a European Parliament meeting running in all 24 languages, both active and passive, the interpreting service needs 72 interpreters — three per booth, twenty-four booths. Plenary sessions are always interpreted into all 24.

The staff numbers behind this are institutional in scale. The Parliament's translation directorate employs around 1,100 people, more than 600 of them translators — one of the largest such employers anywhere — alongside over 270 in interpreting. The total cost of translation and interpretation across all EU institutions runs to roughly €1 billion a year, which works out at just over €2 per EU citizen.

It grew this way in stages. The founding four languages produced 12 combinations. English and Danish in 1973 took it to 30. Greek in 1981, 42. Spanish and Portuguese in 1986, 72. Finnish and Swedish in 1995, 110. Croatian in 2013 completed the current 24, and 552.

Nobody can staff 552 pairs directly, so the institutions run a relay system: a speech is interpreted first into English, French or German, and then out of that into the remaining languages.

The clock: which produces a small, precise, almost invisible fact about time.

Simultaneous interpretation runs a few seconds behind the speaker. With relay, that happens twice. A sentence going from one less-widely-used language to another passes through a second language on the way, and arrives later than the same sentence arriving in English.

So in a full plenary, a single sentence does not reach everyone in the room at the same instant. The delay is a second or two, and it is structural.

Meanwhile the institution running all this is spread across three time zones — Lisbon, Brussels and Helsinki are all in it, an hour apart in each direction. In 2019 the European Parliament voted to abolish seasonal clock changes across the Union. The member states were then required to agree on what to keep instead. They never did, and the clocks still change.

An organisation that solved 552 language combinations, and could not settle one question about the hour.

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