Organisation of high quality master or porst graduate courses in conference interpreting

To ensure the availability of a sufficient number of qualified conference interpreters, Directorate-General for Logistics and Interpretation for Conferences supports and assists in strengthening training programmes by providing professional and financial assistance. The aim of these activities is to help produce new generations of qualified conference interpreters who may, subsequently, be recruited by the EU institutions, and in particular by the European Parliament, as officials or as accredited conference interpreting agents.

As a provider of interpretation services in the European Parliament, and increasingly to other EU institutions and bodies, the mission of the Directorate-General for Logistics and Interpretation for Conferences is to ensure that a sufficient number of qualified conference interpreters are available to enable the EU institutions and bodies to function properly in a context of linguistic diversity including at regular events, all over the world, where wide language cover is required.

Under the principle of subsidiarity, Member States have the obligation to provide the necessary training. The European Parliament identifies the language combinations and skills that best match its needs, and assists universities in training high quality conference interpreters within these priority combinations.

The programme contributes to this mission by supporting the following actions in the field of interpretation:

• The promotion of quality and linguistic diversity in the teaching of conference interpreting in the official languages of the EU, of the candidate countries, and of the countries which are the main political partners of the Union;
• The establishment of postgraduate centres of excellence;
• Cooperation among postgraduate courses from different European, candidate and third countries offering relevant language combinations;
• Regional cooperation among universities with complementary language regimes;

• Higher Education Institutions, Universities, university institutes, consortia and associations of universities or institutes, which offer or coordinate postgraduate courses specialising in conference interpreting.
• Associations, consortia and bodies, whose main mission is to support cooperation and disseminate best practices in the field of worldwide conference interpreter training.