Is there a corrigendum issued to the EU document you are working on that might affect your translation or interpretation? This article gives a bit of background on the topic and shows how Juremy can help you here.

A bit of background on modifications issued to EU documents

Consolidation covers “the action of combining an initial act and all its subsequent amendments and corrections in a single document.” Consolidated texts, although they have no legal effect, are important technical documents as “they show the legal rules that are applicable at a certain point in time”.¹

A corrigendum published in the Official Journal ▶ formally rectifies an error ▶ in one or more language variants of an EU document.² 🖍 In contrast to amendments containing material changes to the original act, corrigenda are applied retrospectively and from the moment of the original publication of the legislative text.

Corrigenda published in relation to the legal act have to be taken into account when choosing the right terminology. Careful research is required as in some cases, corrigenda are published years after the publication of the initial version of the act.³

👉 To ensure accuracy and consistency,⁴ it is crucial for linguists to perform thorough and systematic research of the EU document database. An important part of this process is to find the latest, potentially rectified version of reference documents, which can then be used as a reliable source. Consolidated documents lend themselves particularly well to this. However, there are a few aspects to consider:

• Not every legal act has a consolidated version,
• Not all corrigenda are incorporated in consolidated acts,
• A corrigendum might exist in your target language but not in the source language, in which case you have to review the bilingual version of the consolidated act.

For translation, the safest solution is to systematically check if the reference document has been subject to corrections after its publication in your target language.

How can Juremy help?

✍ As we can see, it is essential to verify if the reference document has been subject to retroactive corrections in the relevant languages before making a terminological choice.

Performing this research is a time-consuming process that involves opening the Document Information related to the researched document in EUR-Lex and looking for the list of modifying documents. With Juremy’s corrigendum indicator, it is now possible to shortcut the research and get notified if a reference document is affected by a corrigendum.

How does this indicator work?

• You can see on the search UI if the source or target language hit document is affected by corrigenda - an R(..) tag will appear.
• 🖱 Clicking on the tag will direct you to the original EUR-Lex source of the corrigendum document itself. Here you can check in detail if your specific query phrase is affected by the corrigendum or not.

What is the R-tag by the way? The Celex document number of the original document gets a suffix of R(01), R(02) and so on for each subsequent corrigendum issued to that document.

Why is this important for me?

Let’s assume that you found a great exact or fuzzy hit for a source-language phrase, coming from official verified soures. So you most likely have a correct reference translation on the target-side of the bilingual match, ready to be incorporated into your work. ✅

But, if you want to be perfectly sure, you would also need to find out if that given source document has been subject to corrigenda in your working languages.

Since many documents are not subject to corrigenda (or not in your current working languages), and even those that are, the chance of the specific corrigenda affecting your hit is quite small, doing this corrigenda research manually can feel unrewarding. This is where Juremy helps, by indicating presence of corrigenda automatically, saving you toil.

How can I access the corrigendum indicator?

The corrigendum indicator is available both in our basic and advanced plans. We are working on further corrigendum preview features coming up in the advanced plan soon. The metadata on corrigenda is currently updated in Juremy on a weekly basis, however we plan to release a daily update in the near future.