WRITTEN QUESTION No. 1983/97 by Kirsi PIHA to the Commission. Documents translated into Finnish
C 60/74 EN Official Journal of the European Communities 25. 2. 98 (98/C 60/108) WRITTEN QUESTION E-1980/97 by Peter Skinner (PSE) to the Commission (9 June 1997) Subject: Heavy Goods Vehicles › fiscal regimes and movement controls What action is the Commission taking to coordinate and harmonize HGV fiscal regimes and movement controls to ensure fair competition, and complete the single market in this sector? Answer given by Mr Kinnock on behalf of the Commission (31 July 1997) In July 1996 the Commission adopted a proposal for a Council directive on the charging of heavy goods vehicles for the use of certain infrastructures (1) intended to replace Directive 93/89/EEC (2), which regulates road fiscal matters in the Community. The Commission proposal is currently under examination in the Council and the Parliament which gave the proposal a first reading in July 1997. Regarding movement controls, the Honourable Member is referred to the Commissionís reply to written question E-41/97 by Mr Cornelissen (3). (1) OJ C 59, 26. 2. 1997. (2) OJ L 279, 12. 11. 1993. (3) OJ C 186, 18. 6. 1997. (98/C 60/109) WRITTEN QUESTION E-1983/97 by Kirsi Piha (PPE) to the Commission (9 June 1997) Subject: Documents translated into Finnish In the past few days there has been negative publicity in Finland about the uneven level of Finnish translation of Commission documents. Some of them have contained particularly bad grammatical errors and their texts have been hard to understand or even completely unintelligible. In the press reference has been made in this connection to the brochure on competition in urban and regional planning issued by the Commissionís regional policy division, which is a glaring example of bad translation. However, according to expert opinion, this brochure was not translated by a Finnish native speaker and it may even have been translated by machine. In order to avoid this type of scrutiny, does the Commission intend to issue internal instructions to all its departments and units using translation services to the effect that they must make use in their translations only of professional translators selected for this task by means of competitions, and must also ensure that a person who receives a document for translation speaks the language into which he is translating as his mother tongue? Will the Commission also ensure that there are enough Finnish language translators to translate all the necessary documents properly? Answer given by Mr Liikanen on behalf of the Commission (11 July 1997) A brochure mistakenly understood by some to be a European institution publication triggered the recent debate on the quality of Finnish translations of Community documents. Such was not the case. The document in question, presented by the daily Helsingin Sanomat in its editions of 20 May 1997, related to the competition for the Urban Planning Award, which is organised by the European Council of Town Planning, a body totally independent of the Commission and any other European institution. Although the organisers received a Commission grant, neither the brochure nor its translation was published or financed by the Commission or by any other institution