Publications Office of the European union
The Publications Office of the European Union produces summaries of key EU regulations in an effort to share information on EU functions with all EU citizens in a clear and easy to understand form. Lingsoft offers a comprehensive solution for maintaining the collection of summaries in the EU’s 24 official languages.
The Publications Office of the European Union is a shared office that publishes European Union agency publications, such as regulatory texts and other materials. The Publications Office maintains several websites, through which citizens, authorities and businesses from EU member states can access official EU information sources such as EUR-Lex and the EU Open Data Portal.
The goal: achieving a mutual understanding of common matters
One of the services offered by the Publications Office is the production of summaries for EU regulations. The purpose of these summaries is to present key EU legislation, policies and activities in a plain, concise way, thus making information on EU activities readily available to all EU citizens in a way that is easy to read and understand. These summaries are published on the European Union’s legal portal, EUR-Lex.
Since the beginning of 2017, Lingsoft’s task has been the comprehensive maintenance of the collection of summaries: monitoring developments in EU legislation and EU court decisions, drafting new summaries and updating old ones with key legislative amendments, and translating summaries from English into 23 languages.
Producing summaries in close co-operation
We produce legislative summaries in close co-operation with our client as well as our own and partner organisations’ legal experts, content producers and translation teams. In addition, dozens of special experts from the EU Directorates-General as well as the Publication Office’s own language experts help check the contents and quality of the summaries during the various phases of the process. Often there are dozens of different summaries in different work phases that are in production at the same time and by different contributors, thus setting the bar very high for process management.
Legislative amendments must be monitored every day and proposals for new summary topics are submitted at least once every week. In communications, the order-delivery process must comply with the EU’s own data transfer protocols. The Publishing Office’s own XML-based publishing format is used in the publication of summaries, and the production process must be integrated into the Publishing Office’s system.
Integrated workflow, shared workspace
Monitoring is supported by Lingsoft’s discoverability solution, which is integrated into the Publishing Office’s semantic information resource. Writing and proofreading are done on the writer’s online desktop, which supports structured content production. In addition to this, quality management tools tailored to the Publishing Office’s writing guidelines can be flexibly added to the desktop, along with the materials, terms and documents to be linked to the texts that are being worked on by content producers and translators. When process automation and software robotics are added to the mix, this solution, right down to its last detail, realises Lingsoft’s vision for the future of language work – the seamless interplay between people and machines.
