Dear colleagues
You many be interested to hear of some of the practical arrangements for the
availability of the acquis communautaire in the applicant country languages. The
following is taking from a Council document issued 13 May 2003
Pending gradual publication of the various volumes of the Special Editions of
the Official Journal in the new languages, it is important to have a provisional
arrangement for making the texts authenticated by the Council and the Commission
available to the public free of charge.
In order to prevent any confusion, these texts will not be presented as new
versions of legislation in force but will occupy a separate page accessible from
EUR-Lex. That page will then be discontinued after the whole of the acquis has
been published in the new languages and integrated into the existing data bases.
In practical terms, there will be a "Preparing Enlargement" button on the
EUR-Lex home page in each of the existing official languages to provide access
to the new page entitled "Secondary legislation in the languages of the
candidate countries", which will, in turn, provide access to a page for each of
the candidate countries' languages. For each of those language pages, the
navigation tools will be in English.
The Legal Services of the Council and the Commission are making texts available
in no particular order. They are not chronological nor are they in the order of
the Directory chapters; no further parallel deliveries in the various languages
are yet to come.
Documents will be made available gradually under the various headings of the
Directory of legislation in force, then by chronological cross-reference per
volume of the special edition. A table will be made available in parallel to
show what texts are available in which language.
There will be a search function from the Eurovoc thesaurus for the languages in
which the thesaurus becomes available. At the moment, the Eurovoc thesaurus
exists in version 3.1 in Lithuanian, Czech and Slovak; version 3.1 is being
finalised in Latvian, Polish and Slovene; there is no Eurovoc in Estonian,
Hungarian or Maltese; an upgrade to version 4 has been requested. It is
essential that acceding countries cooperate in this respect (the thesaurus will
be needed to index all documents published in the OJ as from May 2004).
Work on managing all the documents in the new languages as from May 2004 is
related to the EUR-Lex and Celex integration work.
Best wishes
Ian
Ian Thomson
Editor, European Access/European Access Plus
[http://www.europeanaccess.co.uk]
Executive Editor, KnowEurope
[http://www.knoweurope.net]
Manager, European Documentation Centre, Cardiff University
Information Consultant, Wales Euro Info Centre
President, European Information Association
Contact details:
European Documentation Centre
The Guest Building
PO Box 430
Cardiff University
Cardiff CF10 3XT
Tel: 029-2087-4262
Fax: 029-2087-4717
Email: [log in to unmask]
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