5. General Linguistic Requirements

  Infographic: Contractual Quality Requirements of the final translation.                      

5.1 Joint Handbook 

The Joint Handbook has been drafted by the legal and legal-linguistic services of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission. The purpose of the Joint Handbook is to present guidelines regarding presentation and standard wording for acts subject to the ordinary legislative procedure. 

A PDF version in all languages is available below:

5.2 Inter-Institutional Style Guide

The Inter-Institutional Style Guide represents an achievement in linguistic harmonisation unique in its field due to the number of language communities involved in its developments. It is intended to serve as a reference tool for written works for all European Union institutions, bodies and organisations. 

Its development required the establishment of an interinstitutional steering committee, which designated representatives for each institution and for each language, working under the leadership of a coordinating group based at the Publications Office. 

The effort of harmonising sometimes divergent practices is carried out taking into account the multilingual perspective of the institutions, which requires texts in all official languages to be comparable while retaining the specific character of each language. 

The Style Guide is available in all 24 official EU languages. You can change languages in the top right-hand corner.

5.3 Quality Handbook

The Quality Handbook provides an overview of our quality and linguistic requirements. Additionally, it contains practical recommendations and guidelines for delivering the linguistic products and services we require. 

5.4 Europarl and the EP Public Register

Here you can discover how to find EP reference documents in Word format.

5.5 Terminology Resources

The TermCoord Unit works closely with the European Parliament's External Translation Unit to provide contractors with all the resources available to translators in the language units. Contractors will find extensive material on their website linked below (Termbases, IATE, EurTerm, EU glossaries, Glossary links, DocHound, a list of external linguistic websites, widgets, search tools, etc.).

Please use the following link to visit the TermCoord website: https://termcoord.eu/terminology-for-external-translators/