The Acquis Communautaire (AC) is the total body of European Union (EU) law applicable in the the EU Member States. This collection of legislative text changes continuously and currently comprises selected texts written between the 1950s and now. As of the beginning of the year 2007, the EU had 27 Member States and 23 official languages. The Acquis Communautaire texts exist in these languages, although Irish translations are not currently available. The Acquis Communautaire thus is a collection of parallel texts in the following 22 languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene and Swedish. The JRC did not receive an authoritative list of documents that belong to the Acquis Communautaire. In order to compile the document collection distributed here, we selected all those CELEX documents (see below) that were available in at least ten of the twenty EU-25 languages (the official languages of the EU before Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007) and that additionally existed in at least three of the nine languages that became official languages with the Enlargement of the EU in 2004 (i.e. Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovene). The collection distributed here is thus an approximation of the Acquis Communautaire which we call the JRC-Acquis. The JRC-Acquis must not be seen as a legal reference corpus. Instead, the purpose of the JRC-Acquis is to provide a large parallel corpus of documents for (computational) linguistics research purposes.

Creator(s)

European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Distributor(s)

European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC) - Ralf Steinberger

Right Holder(s)

European Union (EU)