Brussels estimates cost of making Catalan, Basque, and Galician official EU languages at €132M

The European Commission (EC) has estimated the cost of making Catalan, Basque, and Galician official EU languages at €132 million a year in a new report. 

Brussels indicates in the report that the cost of the making each language official would be €44 million, so the figure rises to €132 million for the three.

The estimates are based on calculations made in a 2015 report on the process of making Irish an official language, while the latest EC report also adds that to be more "accurate" other factors should be taken into account, such as the costs of hiring translators, interpretation, legal reviews, and publishing staff for EU institutions and agencies.

Brussels says the cost also depends on existing databases "necessary to feed the translation machinery." If they don't exist, "investment will be needed to generate translation memories and technology and technical equipment to develop it," the text says.

The European Commission has drawn up the report on the costs after the Spanish government asked it to do so to deal with the financial doubts of some member states about the measure.

The document is a key element to moving Spain's request to make the languages official forward, as the rest of the community partners want to know the costs to continue addressing the issue.

Spain has previously offered to cover the costs of making Catalan, Basque, and Galician official EU languages.  

However, the doubts of community partners are not only financial, but also legal and political.

In our podcast Filling the Sink in October, we covered the Catalan language being used in the Spanish Congress, and looked ahead to the possibilities of it becoming an official EU language.