What is it?
In order to promote dissemination and full implementation of EU social dialogue texts, the European social partners have at their disposal a translation fund for joint texts agreed in the framework of the EU social dialogue from / into 24 official and working languages of the European Union as well as the languages of candidate countries1.
What does it cover?
The fund is available for translating EU social dialogue texts, with priority given to inter-professional social dialogue texts and notably those agreed during the period covered. Requests can also be submitted for EU sectoral social dialogue texts which have a direct link with and/or deriving from cross-industry social dialogue texts.
Eligible texts can include different types of joint agreements (framework agreements, framework of actions, joint declarations, documents produced at the national level, etc). Once finalised, the translations will be published on the resource centre websites of the ETUC and employers.
Who can apply?
Member organizations of the European social partners: ETUC (and the liaison committee Eurocadres-CEC), BusinessEurope, SMEunited (formerly called UEAPME) and SGI Europe; as well as European sectoral organisations / industry federations.
How does it work?
To benefit from the fund, national social partners must send a joint request to ETUC and BUSINESSEUROPE, indicating the text(s) they wish to translate and language(s) chosen. Budgetary responsibility is divided as follows:
- ETUC: Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Macedonian, Maltese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
- BusinessEurope: Croatian, Danish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Montenegrin, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian and Slovenian.
National social partners can either ask the EU social partners to organise the work through Brussels-based independent translators or jointly select a national-based translator to carry out the work after obtaining approval for the quote from BusinessEurope or ETUC, according to which organisation has budgetary responsibility. The organisations that submitted the request must jointly check and approve the translated text. The cost of the translation(s) will be borne by either BusinessEurope or ETUC according to the language.
For EU social dialogue texts and agreements, check here
The translation fund benefits from the financial support of the European Commission.
1 List of candidate countries at the time of the project submission deadline (May 2014), according to EC rules