Today, the Commission adopted a strategy that will govern the rearrangement of its translation and interpretation services, to make "multilingualism one of the key policy-making factors" in Europe. For a long time, the EU has been recruiting staff for such services, which make it possible to work in the institutional headquarters (the Commission, Parliament, the Council, the State Auditors’ Department and the Court of Law, to begin with). It would be impossible to exert democracy within the EU if politicians, executives and journalists from 27 different countries did not find such a service in Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg and in other cities in which the EU agencies and institutions are based. However, the Executive rules out any price rise in this area: in 2006, the total disbursement for translating written texts in all the EU institutions has been estimated at 800 million euros, the cost for interpreting services is about 190 million euros. The Commission states that "the total cost of translations and interpreting within all the EU institutions is less than 1% of the yearly budget".
