In the European Commission, the operating languages are English, French and German, but Commission officials will bump up against many of the other languages in the course of their daily work.

Using all those languages is a costly business. A ruling from one of the EU courts – about a machine translation service – has just made things even costlier, landing the Commission with a compensation bill of €12 million.

The Commission began in the 1970s to develop a machine translation service, known as Systran, that would help staff by translating text in a rough-and-ready fashion, for general purposes rather than for legal perfection.

Systran became a feature of office life in the Commission over the course of the next 30 years. In 1988, 4,000 pages of text were translated by the system. By 1995, the figure had risen to 160,000 pages a year. But after an adverse judgment from a European court last month, Commission officials have been ordered not to use Systran anymore.

The court said in a judgment on 16 December that the Commission had “unlawfully disclosed” the intellectual property of Systran, a French software company specialising in translation technology, when in 2003 it awarded a contract to develop the service to a different company. The court has ordered the Commission to pay €12m in compensation to Systran. The Commission is considering whether to appeal against the court’s judgment.

Analysing alternatives: A message posted on the translation department’s website says that the Commission is “analysing alternatives” to restore the service as soon as possible. Vassiliou’s spokesman said that the Commission was planning to develop a new system to replace Systran, either using in-house resources or an external supplier.

The Commission has not yet decided whether to appeal against the General Court’s decision. It has two months from the ruling to decide. The fine must be paid within three months of the verdict.

The European Commission has repeatedly stressed the important of a robust intellectual property protection regime as a way of ensuring that the EU’s innovative companies get their legitimate rewards for the products and services they develop for the global marketplace. It also wants to improve the business environment for small and medium-sized companies. One lesson of the Systran case appears to be that the Commission does not always follow the advice it gives to member states.

See: European Voice