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[Note: this web site is done in a purely private capacity and should in no way be construed as the official position of any institution - and this page hasn't been updated in years :-)]
Europe
has always played a very central part in my life. I had the opportunity to travel widely, and to live in many places, both within and outside Europe, which is the best way to learn to love it. It also fed me and my family (and still does), which is always nice :-).It has for a while, since I started my career working as a free-lance for the Commission in Bruxelles. Then I became official at the Court of Justice in Luxemburg. After 25 years at the Court, and after a couple of years back in the private secteur, I worked at the Publication Office, before joining the Commission , where I worked on the automatic machine translation engines (deep learning). Some engines I made (en-el/en-sp) even won some competition. Here is how we did it.
My last project was speech recognition, which went live at the end of 2022. I felt I couldn't top that and retired :-).
I really believe that Europe is the best way out of our present problems. The idea is terrific, but as usual, it's the implementation which isn't up to what many people expected. But on the whole, I believe the process deserves a big thumb up, since it has prevented war in Europe for many years. That alone is -imnsho-, invaluable.
You'll find below some information I put together a while ago. Part of it is most likely obsolete by now (mostly the figures).
The Institutions
There are 5 European Institutions:- The Council, 27 head of states, based in Bruxelles (Belgium)
- The Commission, 27 Commissaries, based in Bruxelles (Belgium)
- The European Parliament, 705 members, holding one plenary session per month in Strasbourg (France) and the committees' work in Bruxelles (Belgium) the rest of the time.
- The Court of Auditors, 27 members, based in Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
- The European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
The Court of Justice plays a role similar to the US Supreme Court.
Not legally a European Institution, but the financial arm of the Union:
- The European Central Bank, based in Franfurt (Germany)
The linguistic regime
The Court of Auditors is the only Institution which officially works only in French and English.ALL the other Institutions work in ALL the (24) official languages of the Union.
The Court of Justice uses French as internal working language.
As far as the other Institutions are concerned, the linguistic regime of each meeting is determined by the combinations requested by the participants. While in practice it is true that many technical meetings of the Commission are limited to French, German and English, it is by no means mandatory, nor the rule for that matter.
A final note: I am talking here about OFFICIAL languages.
This notion is often misunderstood.
Indeed, there are about 6 millions of people speaking Catalan which is not [note: or wasn't when this was written] an official language of the Union, as opposed to 5 millions of people speaking Danish, which is an official language (or Maltese, with less than 400.000).
This is simply due to the fact that the definition of "official language" is left to the Member States themselves.
If a language is "official language" in a MS, it is de jure and de facto official language of the Union.
Many languages, while widely spoken in some MS (case in point: Catala, spoken in Spain and France) do not enjoy that complete official recognition. Catala is a "national" language of Spain, and has official status in the autonomous region of Catalunya only, not in the whole of Spain (This is changing at the time of this writing, 2007, but was certainly the case when Spain joined in 1986).
Similarly, Luxemburguese is a "national" language in Luxembourg, not the "official" language of the country.