One of the European Union’s priorities and vital tasks is to disseminate information in all languages.
People are not generally aware of the scale and complexity of this task, and the ever-increasing amount and multilingual character of the documentation to be distributed, and it is only through continual development of the techniques used and constant rationalisation that the task can be accomplished each day.
The Interinstitutional style guide has been produced with these things in mind. This publication, continuing a process begun in 1993 with the Vade-mecum for editors, is the fruit of a long round of negotiations in which all the European Union institutions participate actively. Bringing about a process of linguistic standardisation with such a large number of languages appeared unachievable. Nevertheless, the outcome of this exceptional work is proving successful, since the 23 linguistic versions are available on the Office’s style guide website
(http://publications.europa.eu/code/).