In this part of Spain, the most common foreigners have always been British people. In fact, there are many communities in which all the owners are British or know the idiom sufficiently enough to celebrate the meetings in English.
In many cases, the whole meeting is conducted, and even the minutes, are in English.
Some years ago there was a great discussion about the legality of celebrating a meeting exclusively in English. Everything was clarified with the sentence of our Spanish High Court dated 15 November 2002, in which it was revoked a sentence that had declared void the meeting held in English.
The Supreme Court considered that the meeting can be celebrating in English if nobody complain, and only will have to be translated into Spanish if someone requires to do so.
Some Spanish people require to the community administrator to conduct the meeting in Spanish as we are in Spain. Obviously, if the president only speak in English he will be unable to do in Spanish, so all his speeches will have to be in English and the whole meeting would be held in English if nobody asks on the contrary. Anyway, if some Spanish speaking owner ask for a translation, the community would be obliged to provide it.
In this way, this conflict of languages should be resolved by translating all the comments in English or any other language to the Spanish speaking owners, and all the possible cost for the translation into Spanish will have to be paid for the community.
Usually, it will be the administrator or some of someone of his office the one to translate from Spanish to English and vice versa, so in the majority of cases there is no need to pay for this service.
Anyway, in the last few years, many people from other countries, which languages are not commonly known, are buying properties in this area, and we start to face communication problems in many meetings, not only for the translation into Spanish, but for the translation into all these different languages.
Sometimes a particular owner ask for having a translation of the meeting to their own language but this is service that neither has to be provided by the community nor to pay for it.
The community will only be obliged to translate into Spanish, and if a particular owner want to have the meeting translated to Russian, this owner will have to be the one to hire the services of someone to translate to Russian from English or Spanish.
It should be highlighted that celebrate the meeting in Spanish has no obligation to provide a translation to any owner into his own language, either English or any other, although, as mentioned, it is usually made in English by the administrator.
To sum up, if the meeting is conducted in Spanish, the community is not obliged to provide an interpreter in English or any other language. On the contrary, if the meeting is held in another language, the community will only be in charge to translate into Spanish but not to other languages that other owners may have.