Ukraine badly needs to step up its efforts to translate the “acquis communautaire,” an important body of major European Union laws, in order to enhance its European integration processes, Hugues Mingarelli, head of the EU delegation to Ukraine, said at a conference at Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University on Jan. 16.
After 20 years of working on translations of the EU legislation, Ukraine’s state authorities have only about 20,000 pages of the acquis communautaire translated into Ukrainian. The major EU laws, however, comprise about 160,000 pages in total. The cornerstone of the country’s European integration lies in adopting new Ukrainian legislation harmonized with the European Union legal principles.
But for such laws to be adopted by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine needs to have “EU legal acts translated into Ukrainian,” Mingarelli stressed.
EU support for Ukraine
The conference, titled EU TRANSLATED, is meant to help Ukrainian translators produce speedy and high quality translations of the acquis communautaire. Ukraine needs to have the EU legislation translated in order to properly implement the association agreement signed by Ukraine and the EU five years ago.
Speaking at the conference, Mingarelli said that the “EU offers a number of tools helping to translate these documents.” One such tool is the EU-financed Association4U organization, which has the task of bringing Ukraine’s legislation into line with that of the EU. This can only be achieved “successfully when equipped with quality translations,” according to the organization.
Mingarelli said he expected “the conference to provide clear operational conclusions at the end of the event,” so that the EU may further enhance its support for Ukraine’s work on translating the EU acquis communautaire. Currently this work is done by the Ukrainian authorities, but the EU is financing it.
Government expectations
Olga Stefanishyna, the director general of the Ukrainian state body that coordinates Ukraine’s EU and Euro-Atlantic integration, said that the government had prioritized the translation of the acquis communautaire not only for further integration with the EU, but also for “Ukraine to reveal its (new) post-Soviet identity.”
