MADRID, 8 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Congress of Deputies spends an average of 4,500 euros per day for the translation and transcription of co-official languages ??in plenary sessions, which are added to the cost of acquiring headphones and other technical means that were acquired at the beginning of the legislature.
The use of co-official languages ??in Congress was one of the demands of the independentists of ERC and Junts to support Francina Armengol as president and give the PSOE and Sumar the majority on the Chamber Table.
In her first speech after being elected president, Armengol already announced that from that moment on, co-official languages ??could be used in Congress. However, a few weeks later a reform of the Regulations was approved so that it was reflected in detail in the rules of the Chamber.
To begin to apply it, Congress invested 53,000 euros in enabling technical means, including the acquisition of headphones for their honorable Members and the payment of a rental for radio frequency antennas and packs, which represented the bulk of that initial investment.
And the calculation of the cost of the translation was pending, since it depended on the number of translators employed and the hours of work. According to data collected by Europa Press on the Congress Transparency Portal, in the first two weeks of the Plenary Session, translators have been paid between 3,600 and 5,000 euros per day.
Specifically, in the two days of the first ordinary plenary session of the legislature, the one dedicated to approving the regulatory reform to regulate the use of co-official languages, Congress paid 3,630 euros per day, a price that was raised in the following plenary session, the investiture by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in which 5,082 euros were paid in each of the first two days and 3,630 on the day of the second vote.
In total, 21,054 euros were paid for Catalan, Galician and Basque translators in those five days of Plenary Session, which represents an average of just over 4,200 euros.
But to the translators we must add the cost of the transcription service for the interventions made in co-official languages, a task that the Chamber has decentralized. In those five days a total of 1,499.19 euros has been paid, an amount that has varied depending on the days and whether there were more or fewer interventions in Catalan, Basque or Galician.
The day that paid the most was the first plenary session, when the reform of the Congress Regulations was presented and even the PSOE spoke in Galician, which represented a cost of 548.61 euros, and the day that paid the least was in the brief plenary session of the second vote for Feijóo’s investiture, which cost 85.91 euros.
The daily average for transcriptions has therefore stood at 300 euros, which is added to the average bill of 4,200 euros per day for translators.
In the plenary sessions of Congress, the official languages ??have continued to be used and there are parliamentary groups that have already abandoned Spanish, such as Junts and almost the entire Esquerra group – Gabriel Rufián has admitted that he uses Catalan because his party asks him to – while the PNV and Bildu prefer bilingual interventions.
What remains to be seen is how the simultaneous translation and transcription service will be articulated in the parliamentary commissions, which were established last Monday and which have not yet begun to operate.
The first experience was that of the new president of the Road Safety Commission, Marta Madrenas, who took office and spoke her first words in Catalan, but there was no translator present.
Also being left out of the translation is the deputy of the Chunta Aragonesista and member of Sumar, Jorge Pueyo, who uses the Aragonese language in his interventions but cannot get the Diario de Sesiones to collect his words since it is not an officially recognized language in his autonomous community: “(He continues his intervention in the Aragonese language). Thank you very much. (Applause)”, was published.
