Jasna Belc
(Secretariat General of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia/Translation Service, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
By the decision of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, the Government Office for European Affairs (GOEA) was appointed to prepare the Slovene version of the acquis communautaire. The project was carried out in several stages. These were the translation itself, followed by the expert, legal and linguistic revision of the whole body of the text. Final wording was approved by the Commission for the Legal Revision of Translations of EU Legal Acts at the Government Legislation Office. The number of EU Official Journal pages translated from English into Slovene was 88,000. It has to be pointed out that the translation process was not based solely on the English language, but was carried out through comparison with linguistic versions in one or more of other EU official languages..
As a result of systematic terminological work during the whole of the pre-accession period and with a view to ensuring unified terminological solutions to be used in official documents, the GOEA Translation, Revision and Terminology Unit managed to create a comprehensive terminology database Evroterm. Many experts (400) from various fields of knowledge participated in this achievement. The terminology database is available on the web site (http://www.gov.si/evroterm) and contains more than 83,000 entries pertaining to most diverse fields under EU competence. This database has been supplemented by a bilingual translation database called Evrokorpus publicly available on the web site (http://www.gov.si/evrokorpus) and containing more than 630,000 translation units after the recent refreshment. The said terminology and translation databases were given to other institutions and their translation services. In addition, they can daily be used on-line by numerous translators, experts and other interested Slovene public.
The GOEA and the National Assembly jointly prepared the Slovene version of the European Parliament thesaurus Eurovoc 4.1 (http://europa.eu.int/celex/eurovoc). Regarding translation and terminology work, including the use of language technologies, the GOEA Translation, Revision and Terminology Unit established cooperation and exchange of information and work results with numerous related institutions in Slovenia and across Europe. Its work is now being continued by the Translation, Interpretation, Revision and Terminology Service of the Government Secretariat-General.