ABSTRACT
The EU’s de jure multilingualism and de facto monolingualism are underpinned by a tension between unity and multiplicity, which manifests itself in the bloc’s translation regime as well. This chapter offers an overview of the EU’s language services – their numbers, set-up, regimes, legal foundations and underpinning notion of language and translation. The latter is then contrasted with the notions of equivalence and translatability, chiefly in contemporary translation studies, with special emphasis on the recent debate on untranslatability unleashed by the publication of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. The EU’s translation regime is embedded in framework of unity versus multiplicity inspired by Jacques Derrida’s vision for Europe grounded in the need to respect these two imperatives simultaneously. The chapter outlines a language turn and a translation turn for the EU as a way to heed Derrida’s call and tip the scales in favour of de facto multilingualism.
