In addition to the political and economic Copenhagen criteria, one of the key elements in the process of the Republic of North Macedonia's membership of the European Union is the obligation to harmonize national legislation with the acquis. As a prerequisite and the first most important step, which is both permanent and takes place after the country becomes a full member of the EU, is the translation of EU law, or more precisely, the preparation of the national version of the acquis (European Union law).
In order to achieve this important segment of the membership obligations, a high-quality translation of the legal acts of the European Union into the national language, its linguistic, professional, legal revision and proofreading are necessary, which is a complex and long-term process, which takes place in several stages and which includes a more extensive structure (translators, legal and professional reviewers, language reviewers, documentalists, proofreaders, IT experts, experts from all areas covered by the EU legal acts, as well as the scientific and academic community).
One of the main challenges associated with the translation of EU law is the huge corpus (currently around 200,000 pages of the Official Journal of the EU), as well as the extensive corpus of national legislation and a number of key documents important for the negotiations and the process of European integration of the Republic of North Macedonia, which need to be translated and revised from a professional, legal and linguistic perspective. This undertaking requires a well-established methodology, clearly defined standards and procedures, as well as a gradual and continuous strengthening of the internal and external capacities involved in the process, in order to achieve better quality.
This extensive multidisciplinary project, in itself, is inexhaustible, extremely complex, multi-year and can be considered one of the largest translation projects in the history of any candidate country.