PARIS: A report authored by Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and circulated to heads of government in the other 14 member countries of the European Union, claims that if nothing is done to limit the number of official languages spoken at the EU, the Brussels-based institution will become a virtual Tower of Babel.
The situation will get so much out of hand, warns Persson, that he envisions meetings of the European Council “where the number of interpreters will easily surpass the number of delegates.”
As matters now stand, the EU presently has eleven official working tongues (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Portuguese and Swedish), not to mention Gaelic and Luxembourgeois which are formally recognized as “national tongues.”
With the enlargement of the EU to 25 member nations, the national tongues will also include Hungarian, Letton, Lithuanian, Estonian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Czech and Turk, the tongue of northern Cyprus.
As a result, notes Persson, translators will have to struggle with 420 different linguistic combinations, as opposed to already 110 at present. Theoretically, the report said, that will mean that EU translators will have to translate such combinations as Letton into Turk and Finnish into Portuguese.
As for the number of translators, their number will also rise correspondingly, with each new language requiring the taking on of 110 new translators, therefore bringing the total number up to 2400.
In terms of the number of pages they will translate, Persson says he’d rather not venture a guess, except to say that already 1.3 million pages of originals are produced annually in the existing 10 official tongues, and that, in his estimation, is already more than enough.
Especially as the total number of documents printed from the original is so vast that just stocking them in Brussels means the rental of tens of thousands of cubic metres worth of increasingly expensive and hard-to-find warehouse space.
As for the additional cost to be borne by the EU’s operating budget, this should rise substantially from the annual translation budget of Euros 700 million (630 million dollars), although the Persson provides no firm figures as to what the new total will be. Those available, however, for another of the several European institutions to be affected by the arrival of the new languages - the European Parliament at Strasbourg - would indicate that the additional cost for the EU as a whole will be truly phenomenal.
Already at present, says the report, the translation budget for the European Parliament totals Euros 274 million (250 million dollars) and represents fully 30 per cent of the Assembly’s overall operating budget. With the addition of the 119 additional interpreters who will be hired on in the next few months for the Parliament, the additional cost will bring the total up to Euros 443 million (400 million dollars), and much closer, says a Parliamentary source, to 40 per cent of that institution’s overall budget.
Indeed, the arrival of all the new translators and interpreters, says the source, should see the EU’s total operating budget also obliged to consecrate about 40 per cent of its resources to translations.
Although one would have expected for the Persson report to recommend that Europe limit the number of official tongues to three German and French as well as English), or indeed one (English) , as some have proposed, Prime Minister Persson stresses in his report that cutting down on the number of tongues would go against the grain of the essence of Europe.
“The national tongues of all the member states,” he says, “must remain the official languages of the European Union. It’s essential for its survival.” Indeed, says Persson, “The European Union would no longer exist if its members did not speak, at present, 11 tongues.” And “never forget,” he adds, “that in Europe, language is the central element of the identity of the various peoples who make up the EU.”
Any solution, as a result, would have to be “technical” in nature, concludes Persson, with European officials privy to his way of thinking saying they would like for the EU to select the language to be used as a function of the task to be performed. And why not make those who demand documents in their national tongue to pay for the service, add others.
With regard to coming up with a solution, technical, financial, or otherwise, a most instructive debate over which tongues should be given precedence by the EU has been sparked by a story in the German weekly Der Spiegel, which reports that French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine had tried to convince his fellow ministers to eliminate German as an official tongue, therefore making English and French the EU’s two official working languages.
As far as the British are concerned, though, if they had their way, English would be the only working tongue for the EU.