Multilinguism Commissioner Leonard Orban will today be paying his first official visit to a member state whose language is one of the EU's 23 official languages. Brussels correspondent Ivan Camilleri asked him whether Maltese really matters to the EU.

Why are you coming to Malta?

My main aim is to present to the Maltese public and language stakeholders our (European Commission) new strategy on multilingualism. I will be meeting the Maltese authorities to discuss ways of improving the process of learning languages in the Maltese islands.

The Maltese language is only spoken by 400,000 people out of 500 million EU citizens. Do you really think that this small language is important to the EU?

First of all, although it is true that only 400,000 people use the Maltese language on a daily basis, Maltese is not the smallest language in Europe. It may be the smallest official EU language but there are many other languages in Europe spoken by less than half a million people. More importantly, for the EU, all languages are important and our aim is to promote our linguistic diversity which we cherish. We don't consider languages in terms of size... For us, all our languages are equally important.

The EU is the only international organisation which publishes its documents in all its 23 official languages. Do you really think that EU citizens are interested in reading all these documents?

Well, first of all we don't translate everything because the volume of our activities is huge. So currently we are only translating the most important documents. Whether these documents are read is a different question. However, I think that there is enormous interest among EU citizens concerning our decisions and activities. One important aspect of our translations is linked with legislation as there is no doubt that it should be translated. This is a question of democracy as it provides access to decisions affecting the citizens. Every EU citizen has to have the right to read in his or her mother tongue the decisions adopted by the EU.

But this comes at a big cost for EU taxpayers...

I don't agree that this is a heavy burden on the EU budget. It's only one per cent of the total EU budget a year. It is costing us approximately €1.1 billion per year or just €2.5 per EU citizen. I don't think that this is too much for something on which our democracy is based.

This means that if the EU expands further we can expect the costs to rise accordingly, to cater for new official languages such as Turkish. How far can this go on?

Nobody knows how many languages we are going to have in the future. We will see. There are countries from the Western Balkans, for example, which aim at becoming members. Maybe a political settlement in Cyprus will also lead to an increase in the number of official languages of the EU. We need to wait and see. What we can say now is that we have succeeded to adapt our linguistic regime to accommodate all the new member, including Maltese. Before the 2004 enlargement, we had only 11 official languages. Now, we more than doubled our languages since then and we succeeded. The system today is working which clearly shows that we have the capacity also to deal with more languages in the future.

And how is the Maltese language faring...were the initial difficulties settled?

Our task with regards to the Maltese language was not easy. That is why initially we needed a transition period so that on the one hand the Maltese authorities had more time to translate the Acquis and on the other we have more people who are able to work with the EU institutions. We needed translators, interpreters and others working in the official publications department. I can tell you that it is not very easy to train interpreters as this is an extremely complicated process. However, we are on the right track and the situation is improving. We have reason to be optimistic but, on the other hand, the Maltese authorities should continue the training for specialists in this area because otherwise it will be very difficult to have full coverage of the Maltese language at the community level.