The Congress of Deputies has warned since this Monday that the first speeches in Catalan, Basque and Galician delivered in the chamber without interruptions, and included in the Session Log of the first plenary session of the legislature, have been transcribed and translated “by the services interpretation and transcription”. That is, by an external company, and not by the Chamber's stenographers, the officials who are in charge of capturing the relevant words and “events” in this official document.. As El Confidencial reported, lawyers from the Palacio de la Carrera de San Jerónimo were required to provide a formula to include in the Session Log the notice that not everything captured in its pages came from the stenographers.. These officials had shown reluctance to assume as their own the translations and transcriptions of third parties in other languages that would later be included in the document..

Official Congressional sources maintain today that “the professionalism” of the translators is assumed, and they refuse to use the word “warning” to refer to the text incorporated at the end of the Session Log.. “It is a description of what has been done,” they maintain.. Legal sources from the Chamber affirm that, given its nature as an official public document, the Session Log cannot be partially valid, and they consider it unusual that today it incorporates a text in which they understand that the responsibility of a third party is indicated.. In other copies published by the Senate, where Catalan, Basque and Galician have been used for years in some assessed cases, no mention is included of the fact that professionals outside the Upper House are the ones who guarantee the reliability of the translations and the transcripts.

“In the case of interventions made in Spanish languages other than Spanish that are also official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes, the Session Log reflects the interpretation into Spanish and the transcription of the intervention in said languages, provided for interpretation and transcription services”. The formula is more nuanced and much less forceful than the one incorporated into the plenary session signal translated into Spanish, for the first time, last Tuesday. Then, Congress already warned that “in no case” could the translations be considered “an authenticated recording” of the debates.. “Simultaneous interpretation,” he stated, only seeks to “facilitate communication between the participants in the meeting.”.

Today, the Chamber insists that the Session Log is one more instrument, like the video signal itself, to give “publicity”, understood as a public nature, to the plenary sessions.. The legal sources in question warned days ago that a disclaimer clause could bury the “probative effectiveness” of this document.. Implicitly, this warning indicates that stenographers are responsible only for the words originally spoken in Spanish.. On Friday, Congress did not know how to detail whether they would include a message like the one they finally added.

Article 95 of the Regulation establishes as official publications the Official Gazette of the Cortes Generales, Congress section, and the Journal of Sessions.. To date, the Session Diary was usually published on the day after the plenary session in question, although there is no rule that imposes a specific periodicity for its publication.. The document corresponding to last Thursday's plenary session is not yet ready, when the reform of the Regulations was approved to consolidate the right of parliamentarians to use these languages. The modification came into force when it was published in the Official Gazette.

The Congress plans to allocate 8,500 euros until December to pay for the external translation service, which has allowed the Session Log to be multilingual for the first time.. In fact, the document made public this Monday incorporates the transcription of the stenographers, but also the paragraphs spoken in the official languages in the respective autonomous communities..

The translation of these interventions into Spanish is also added in italics.. It is the last two contributions that have led the Lower House to warn that “the interpretation and transcription services” are the ones who provide them for inclusion in the Session Log.. There are already committees to which stenographers do not attend, and the transcription of statements is carried out by third parties, but until now there has been no allusion to this reality in the official publications of Congress. These sessions, in any case, were held in Spanish, and the work of the external company could be reviewed and corrected by the stenographers..