On 16 February, two representatives from the Centre met the European Labour Authority (ELA) and its national translation coordinators to review the functioning of the ELA Translation Facility. This Facility consists of a workflow that enables Member State authorities to create translation requests on the Centre’s Client Portal for texts complying with predefined eligibility criteria, and the ELA is able to validate these requests and control the budget consumption per Member State.

Since 2021, the Centre's Workflow Management and Advanced Language Solutions Sections have been collaborating very closely with the ELA to make this workflow run smoothly for all parties involved. Specific instructions and training sessions have been provided on several occasions to ELA-users as well as to the national translation coordinators. 

In 2022, 24 Member States submitted 113 requests via the Translation Facility. In total, 183 source documents were sent for translation yielding 421 translations, out of which 101 were translations in non-EU languages. Among these, 56 were in Ukrainian. The most popular subject areas were ‘free movement of workers‘ and ‘raising awareness among persons displaced from Ukraine to prevent undeclared work, abuse, discrimination, and labour exploitation’, followed by ‘road transport’ and ‘posting of workers’.

In preparation for this meeting, the ELA had conducted a survey among the national translation coordinators to assess their level of satisfaction with the Translation Facility. In total, 19 responses were received, representing approximately 80% of the Member States that requested translations in 2022. The results confirmed a high level of satisfaction overall with the established modus operandi.

Another important point on the agenda of this meeting was the status update on the ongoing ELA terminology project. In June 2022, the Centre and ELA started a project for the agency in all 24 EU languages, comprising 60 source terms, which progressed well during the year and will continue in 2023. The Centre’s presentation focused on the different steps necessary for a fully-fledged terminology project and the long-term benefits of such work for all parties involved.

The ELA representatives stressed the importance of multilingualism for labour mobility, assuring the Member States of their continued direct support for translations in 2023.