DG Interpretation’s 6th Customer Satisfaction Survey on the Quality of Interpretation

The mission of DG Interpretation (DG SCIC) is to facilitate the multilingual democratic decision-making process in the EU. To achieve this, DG SCIC offers quality conference interpretation services and state-of-the-art services in corporate meeting rooms and conference management.

The complex and diverse meetings, which take place at the EU Institutions, require quality interpretation, provided according to professional quality standards, by interpreters having excellent analytic and communication skills and language combinations adapted to the needs of the meeting participants.

As stated in DG Interpretation’s Strategic Plan 2020-2024, satisfaction with the quality of interpretation expressed by users is one of DG SCIC’s key performance indicators (KPIs). The indicator measures the quality of interpretation according to users’ perception and enables identifying possible areas of improvement. DG SCIC regularly conducts customer satisfaction surveys to measure the quality of interpretation.

In line with the European Green Deal and the Digital Decade, this year’s Customer Satisfaction Survey on the Quality of Interpretation was conducted fully online. The survey was open from 7 March to 18 March 2022 and accessible to meeting participants within the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions and Europol. The questionnaire was made available to meeting participants in different ways in all 24 official languages. For instance, in the Council, the delegates could access the link or QR code from the Delegates’ Portal; in other institutions, similar tools were used.

The results of this year’s survey show high overall satisfaction with interpretation. With 93% of the respondents either Very satisfied or Satisfied with interpretation, the overall satisfaction expressed by the users is above the target (85%) set for this KPI, which indicates that DG SCIC is keeping up with the very high standards reflected in the previous surveys. The results also prove that DG SCIC has succeeded in adapting to the digitalisation of the delivery of interpretation: respondents who took part in meetings online were almost as satisfied with interpretation as respondents who took part in meetings in person.

If you are interested in an overview of the most salient results, please consult the short summary.

For a more detailed insight, please consult the full report.

Happy reading!