The Interpretation of Community Documents in the European Court of Justice

Abstract The twenty-five Member States that constitute the European Union differ on linguistic, cultural and legal grounds. Multilingualism remains however one of the key principles of the EU as its entire legislation is translated into all the twenty official languages. Such principle is indispensable to guarantee transparency and cultural democracy to Europe’s citizens. However, the usual complexities generally related to legal translation are even worsened at Community level by the presence of different legal systems and an intricate legislative drafting process. Furthermore, the principle of equality of all languages in EU law impedes the possibility to refer to an original version in the case of discrepancy across different language versions. Against this background, the paper illustrates the arbitrating role played by the European Court of Justice, whose primary task is to ensure that EU legislation is uniformly interpreted and applied throughout national courts. Examples are taken from the Court’s judgments to illustrate the different interpretative approaches of EU law in disputes on linguistic incongruity. Keywords Multilingualism, EU law, Legal translation, Interpretation of equally authoritative texts