The normative and political production of the European institutions stands sometimes for a twofold paradigm of translation: first, because it is legal translation, and then because it takes complexity to the extreme. The translator in the European institutions is the necessary agent of a discourse that has legal effects in the twenty-eight official languages. Many stereotypes on the translating activity are jeopardised in this environment. In the Commission, everything starts with a working document, usually in the English language, which is said to be “original” but whose final state is only guaranteed at the end of a complex course. The intent of the lawmaker, equivalent to an “intention” of the European public authority, is the result of compromises between the services and with the parties concerned which are discussed at several key stages between the institutions. The monolingual original does little to help trace this initial intention: in the interinstitutional process, multilingualism reminds us that the centre is everywhere. Translation, which is at the heart of legislative drafting, must also find a recipient: the key concepts, often neologisms aimed at creating a new legal and political reality, are reconstructed in the target language. Equivalence however is elusive or even undesirable. Each language has its solutions to accommodate this new linguistic reality which cannot always be assimilated from the lexical point of view and whose status remains, by necessity, close to a right of asylum.