Press Release: European Commission prepares its language services for enlargement

The European Commission adopted two consultative documents and an action plan on its language-related preparations for enlargement on 20 December 2001. The aim is to safeguard multi-lingualism by ensuring that costs are kept under control despite the foreseen arrival of up to ten new languages as of 2004. This will be achieved through a series of modernisation measures, including better planning and coordination among services, establishing a permanent dialogue between the language services and their clients, better use of support staff, new technologies and external resources and the reduction of translation work on draft documents.