On 3 March, SCIC’s Director General, Genoveva Ruiz Calavera, and the newly appointed Head of the English Interpretation Unit, Morag Neath, met Jack Chambers, the Irish Minister responsible for Sport and the Gaeltacht (the Irish term for the districts where the government recognises that the Irish language is the predominant vernacular). The minister was keen to hear first-hand of SCIC’s experience to date regarding the recruitment of interpreters with Irish and any ideas which we wanted to explore with him on this subject.
Ms Ruiz Calavera began the meeting by setting out the challenges currently faced by SCIC as a whole as a result of the ongoing pandemic and then moved on to the specific question of Irish interpretation.
When Ireland joined the European Communities in 1973, it did not ask for Irish to be one of the EU institutions’ official and working languages, but only to have the Treaties translated into Irish and for its citizens to have the right to communicate with the EU institutions in Irish. Consequently, Irish was not added to the list of official and working languages in Regulation No 1 and the EU institutions did not draft or publish legislation in Irish.
However, in 2005, Ireland requested that the Irish language be accorded the same status as that accorded to the national official languages of the other Member States, and thus became an official and working language of the Union. Initially a derogation was applied, which meant that not all legislation had to be translated into Irish, in order to give the institutions time to adapt and recruit the necessary translators, lawyer linguists and interpreters. This derogation was extended on several occasions but finally ended on 31 December 2021.
There is only one conference interpreting course in the world which trains interpreters with Irish, namely the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). SCIC has been cooperating with NUIG for over a decade now and that cooperation has intensified in recent years with both the prospect of the end of the Irish derogation and the advent of Brexit (NUIG is now the only interpretation masters in an English-speaking EU member state). Not only does SCIC provide pedagogical assistance but many of NUIG’s students have benefited from SCIC bursaries over the years and more recently, SCIC awarded a very generous grant for new interpreting facilities at the university that should be opening at the end of this month.
SCIC’s efforts have paid off and in the last 3 years, we have recruited 4 temporary staff with passive Irish (in one case also active Irish). Demand for passive Irish has continued to grow and is being spoken regularly in certain ministerial meetings. The Irish Minister explained that with current government policy in Ireland actively promoting a greater use of Irish across all walks of life, the demand for Irish interpretation is bound to increase in the future. Clearly, therefore, we shall need more than the 4 staff we currently have to satisfy that demand.
This is where the big challenge lies. Ireland has a population of just under 5 million and according to the 2016 Census, “only 1.7% of today’s population uses Irish as a community and household language”. This means we are fishing in a very small pool that has already been fished almost dry by the translation and lawyer linguist services of the Commission and the other EU institutions, not to mention the Irish Houses of the Oireachtas (Parliament) and Stormont (the Northern Ireland Assembly). During the Covid crisis, we lent our colleagues with Irish to the EP to enable them to provide Irish interpretation at their plenary sessions, as the Ireland-based ACIs were unable to travel. However, even under normal travel conditions, the pool of interpreters with Irish for the 3 institutions remains very small.
One thing is clear, we are a demand-driven service so we have to strive to meet that demand, but at the same time, we have to act responsibly and recruit interpreters who not only work with Irish but are able to work from more widely used languages too.
So what is SCIC doing to try to recruit more Irish interpreters with Irish in their combination? In addition to supporting the course in Galway, we have carried out intense outreach across Ireland. Our participation at the October EU Careers with Irish event in cooperation with the Minister’s Department has become an annual feature. We have organised 3 highly successful road trips around the Irish universities and have taken part in the last 3 editions of the Languages Connect (a government initiative to encourage foreign language learning in Irish schools) #think languages event ThinkLanguages - Languages Connect. And last but not least, we have produced a number of outreach videos, including “a day in the life of an Irish interpreter” A day in the life of an Irish interpreter - YouTube.
The meeting concluded in a very positive spirit, with clear support from the Irish authorities for the efforts being made by SCIC. These efforts are set to continue with more outreach initiatives in the pipeline and we shall of course continue our ongoing support to NUIG in the hope that we can welcome more Irish colleagues into the SCIC fold.
Source: Ms Morag Neath, Head of the English Interpretation Unit, DG SCIC