The Commission is gearing up to take in ten new Member States from May 2004, with nine, o
r possibly ten, new languages. Preparations are also necessary in the longer-term for the languages of Bulgaria and Romania, which are expected to join in 2007. This
does not in any way mean that the Commission will move away from the principle of working multilingually. The Commission and the candidate countries are hard at work preparing to meet the new challenge, by training translators and interpreters, developing a special human resources str
...[+++]ategy, expanding the language cover provided by the European institutions' websites and, of course, translating and checking the whole corpus of EU law (the so-called "acquis"), which at present runs to about 97,000 pages.
La Commission et les pays candidats travaillent d'arrache-pied pour relever ce nouveau défi: ils forment des traducteurs et des interprètes, mettent au point une stratégie particulière en matière de ressources humaines, développent la couverture linguistique des sites web des institutions européennes et, bien entendu, traduisent et vérifient l'ensemble de la législation communautaire, ce que l'on appelle "l'acquis", qui comprend actuellement quelque 97 000 pages.