In order to provide policymakers and the wider public with up-to-date, objective, reliable and comparable information, the EMN has been developing and updating a comprehensive Glossary that identifies and describes different concepts central to asylum and migration policy in the EU.

EMN Georgia and EMN Latvia have decided to bring this glossary into the spotlight and to gather representatives of EMN National Contact Points (NCPs), academic circles and migration practitioners from different countries to remember the importance of speaking a common language and also to discuss challenges linked to the development, the translation and the promotion of national glossaries.

Participants in the conference discussed and underlined inter alia the following key points:

• Developing, translating and updating the EMN Asylum and Migration Glossary is a never-ending cycle. Needs have to be identified, new terms have to be proposed, definitions and interpretations from experts in the field have to be examined in depth, agreed terms and definitions have to be made available, regularly updated and used in practice.

• The EMN Asylum and Migration Glossary requires cooperative work. Apart from the knowledge and practice of experts in the field, the work of lawyer-linguists from key institutions such as the Court of Justice of the European Union is key in the process of developing and updating the Glossary. Coordination with databases like IATE and other available glossaries (EUAA, IOM) is also key to achieving efficient results.

• The EMN Asylum and Migration Glossary now includes translations of all terms into Georgian and Ukrainian. Translating a term requires examining the language but also the migration context. For instance: in Georgian, relocation and resettlement are both translated into one single term, which is mainly associated with internally-displaced Georgians. Other terms are very debated in the national contexts, such as irregular vs illegal. Translating the Glossary into a new language is a mutually beneficial process because it leads to re-examining the original English version and it helps to keep the Glossary up to date with sources from the EU acquis.

• Promoting the use of the EMN Asylum and Migration Glossary should lead EU institutions, policymakers, academia and the media to communicate in an appropriate and efficient way and should allow us to understand each other despite different languages and cultures.

If you wish to know more about the EMN Asylum and Migration Glossary, please visit this webpage.