6 ms·

European Parliament publishes a corrigendum to the GDPR

28 points by raleighm 8y ago

protomyth 8y ago
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.
- jolmg 8y ago
  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?
  - fyfy18 8y ago
    There’s a court for exactly this purpose, which has one judge from each member state: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodie...
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  > 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/6984/6983 https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/cl/article/download/698...
  - vilhelm_s 8y ago
    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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ucaetano 8y ago
  Not just the GDPR, but regulatory bodies. If you're a German company serving mostly German users, but you have a single user in Portugal, and that single user files a complaint with the Portuguese authorities, bad news, they will investigate you and communicate with you in Portuguese, and you'll have to hire Portuguese-speaking legal counsel to deal with them. And then you have a single user in Lithuania who decides to file to complaint. And then another one in Romania. And so on. You don't even have to have done anything wrong, you might be 100% GDPR-compliant, but that would be enough to possibly drive you out of business.
  - ameixaseca 8y ago
    I'm eager to hear the alternative.
    - cornholio 8y ago
      A single English legislation, with non-authoritative local versions translated by local governments. The actual language used could be a simplified subset of English, easy to understand for the majority of Europeans. People in legal professions dealing with EU regulations would need to obtain language certifications, but it would massively simplify the EU bureaucracy.
      - beojan 8y ago
        Yes, let's make English the sole official language of the EU. That would go down really well. /s The current system works really well, and puts the burden of having to deal with people speaking other languages on governments rather than individuals. There's no reason to mess with it because of some imaginary issue.
        jorvi 8y ago
        I’m Dutch and I would be completely down for making English the sole official language of the EU. 90% of the reason we haven’t already is the French and their pride. They even want to completely switch back to French as the main EU language when Brexit is fully done.. I mean, come on! As if the the whole two-week circus of moving the entire parliament to Strasbourg and then back to Brussels isn’t enough of a travesty of inefficiency to pay for their pride.
- Someone 8y ago
  The EU has 24 official/working languages (https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/b03ddac8-7df5-4d35-aa02-f15eb8884b1c/language-en/format-PDF/source-71270528 https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...) I see those 24 languages for the GDPR (https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3e485e15-11bd-11e6-ba9a-01aa75ed71a1/language-en 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 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_Union 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.
- tscs37 8y ago
  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.
- tmalsburg2 8y ago
  Sandardized translations with some minor meaning mismatches are preferable to individual courts translating the law ad hoc for each individual case.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  I suspect they have lots of experience at making sure translations are accurate.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

28 points by raleighm 8y ago

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.

jolmg 8y ago
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?
- fyfy18 8y ago
  There’s a court for exactly this purpose, which has one judge from each member state: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodie...
oh_sigh 8y ago
> 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/6984/6983 https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/cl/article/download/698...
- vilhelm_s 8y ago
  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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ucaetano 8y ago
Not just the GDPR, but regulatory bodies. If you're a German company serving mostly German users, but you have a single user in Portugal, and that single user files a complaint with the Portuguese authorities, bad news, they will investigate you and communicate with you in Portuguese, and you'll have to hire Portuguese-speaking legal counsel to deal with them. And then you have a single user in Lithuania who decides to file to complaint. And then another one in Romania. And so on. You don't even have to have done anything wrong, you might be 100% GDPR-compliant, but that would be enough to possibly drive you out of business.
- ameixaseca 8y ago
  I'm eager to hear the alternative.
  - cornholio 8y ago
    A single English legislation, with non-authoritative local versions translated by local governments. The actual language used could be a simplified subset of English, easy to understand for the majority of Europeans. People in legal professions dealing with EU regulations would need to obtain language certifications, but it would massively simplify the EU bureaucracy.
    - beojan 8y ago
      Yes, let's make English the sole official language of the EU. That would go down really well. /s The current system works really well, and puts the burden of having to deal with people speaking other languages on governments rather than individuals. There's no reason to mess with it because of some imaginary issue.
      - jorvi 8y ago
        I’m Dutch and I would be completely down for making English the sole official language of the EU. 90% of the reason we haven’t already is the French and their pride. They even want to completely switch back to French as the main EU language when Brexit is fully done.. I mean, come on! As if the the whole two-week circus of moving the entire parliament to Strasbourg and then back to Brussels isn’t enough of a travesty of inefficiency to pay for their pride.
Someone 8y ago
The EU has 24 official/working languages (https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/b03ddac8-7df5-4d35-aa02-f15eb8884b1c/language-en/format-PDF/source-71270528 https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...) I see those 24 languages for the GDPR (https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3e485e15-11bd-11e6-ba9a-01aa75ed71a1/language-en 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 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_Union 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.
tscs37 8y ago
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.
tmalsburg2 8y ago
Sandardized translations with some minor meaning mismatches are preferable to individual courts translating the law ad hoc for each individual case.
jonhendry18 8y ago
I suspect they have lots of experience at making sure translations are accurate.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]