Translation has always played a major role within the European institutions because it
provides the basis for democracy and communication among the Member States and
between the EU and its citizens. The enlargements brought about changes in the internal
organization of the institutions – including translation services and their workflow – to
respond to the new challenge of accommodating 23 official languages. A greater need for
translation support was met thanks to a growing number of shared tools and resources
developed over time, such as centralised web-based applications and meta-search engines.
This paper focuses on one specific tool available to translators working at the EU institutions,
i.e. an internally developed multilingual concordancer. Concordancers are widely used by
translators but little information is available about them in terms of tool evaluation or user
behaviour. This article presents a PhD research project aimed to partly fill this gap by
investigating the relationship between concordance searches (seen as manifestations of
translation problems) and language combination within the EU translation services.
